


By Wing and Claw

by silvergryphon



Series: Secrets in the Blood [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, LXG backstory, Multi, Other, Shapeshifting, So Much Snark, alien supersoldiers, also a gryphon, and lots of research, and there is snark, but for now, fun with supersoldiers, have an alien supersoldier and agent fighting in WWII, in which Peggy is awesome, it's gonna be a ride, no smut in this one, sit down strap in and hold on tight kiddos, sorry that Steve doesn't show up until waaaay into this thing, there will be bisexual poly shenanigans later in the series I promise, touches a little on F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-05-21 02:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 48,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6033886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvergryphon/pseuds/silvergryphon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Erskine derived his supersoldier formula from the blood of one already bred to be more than human. Daria Noclaf is not thrilled- but she doesn't have time to deal with it. There's a war on. She and Peggy Carter have things to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Night Flight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So welcome to my third attempt at this particular story. All I can say is thank goodness for National Novel Writing Month! I finally sat down and wrote this, and then finally sat and did some edits so I could get it posted.
> 
> This will be a series. The first story is written up and about finished so I can dole out chapters on a semi-regular basis while I work on the next installment. We'll be following Daria all the way through Captain America 2 for certain; beyond that I'm not sure. We'll see when I actually get a chance to study subsequent films.
> 
> Insert standard 'I don't own anyone you recognize' disclaimer, etc etc.

_November, 1940_

_Germany_

                For a region nearly on the front, the night was startlingly quiet. The patrols on the border were alert, but seemed to find no signs of trouble that drew their attention. No aeroplanes were making night raids onto either side, so the big guns of the army fortifications were silent. No scout groups found enemies, no machine guns rattled off to break the quiet.

                At this height, all Daria Noclaf heard was the wind rushing through the long primary feathers of her outstretched wings. She wasn’t afraid, not on a moonless night like this. She was too small, too soft, too swift to be really noticed by radar as anything more than a glitchy blip, and on so dark a night it seemed unlikely anyone would notice even a horse-sized creature soaring through the skies.

                A gust of wind caught her. She rode it out, keeping her wings steady as the updraft bounced her a little. No storms tonight, despite the generous handful of clouds scuttling by overhead.

                A good night for an extraction.

                She scanned the ground below her, searching for landmarks in the dim starlight. Was that-

                Yes, there was the valley that had been noted on the map. There was the waterfall that tumbled down from an overhanging cliff to feed the stream that ran through its heart. There were the double-handful of buildings lining the sides of the stream, and the wrecks of several others.

                Daria had seen far too many abandoned border towns in the last several years.

                _We all hoped the Great War would be the last conflict of its kind. How wrong we were._

She took one risk then, sending out a brief silent call with her mind.  Just a single word, ‘here’, no more than that.  The one she was looking for would be ‘listening’ and alert for that brief contact.

                She reached the valley, folded her wings, and dove, tucking front and hind legs in close to her belly to give her the smoothest profile possible. She delighted in the lurch of freefall that made her stomach leap, the delicious feeling of precisely-controlled plummeting.  A twitch of a feather, a claw, a flick of her tail, all changed her arc with the exquisite control of a dancer.

                When she had dropped below the cliffs that surrounded the village, she spread her wings open again with a snap like sailcloth catching in a strong wind. The movement wrenched her shoulders, and Daria grinned, enjoying the sheer physical exertion. Wings spread wide, she shot over the outermost buildings, scanning each in turn. Where were they hiding, where….

                _There!_

                A glimpse of mostly-shuttered light flickering at a window.  She pulled up sharply, wings flaring out, and beat hard to slow herself. The thunder of her wings rang shockingly loud loud in the quiet night.  Her talons skittered a little on the cobbled stones of the street, gouging marks in them.

                “Daria!”

                She turned at the sound of the hissed voice, ear tufts pricking forward. “Insside!” she hissed back. Moving at a trot, Daria shed her gryphon shape. Long experience let her make the switch from gryphon to her own form without even stumbling, even as she moved from four legs to two.

                Peggy was waiting for her at the door of one of the less-damaged houses lining the main street of the village, waving her in. Daria slipped in past her, and she hastily shut the door to block the light from the lamps she’d lit.

                “I’m glad you made it,” she said, brushing a curl back from her face. “We were starting to get worried. There have been more patrols than we expected, and our extraction team couldn’t get past them. I didn’t want to risk going on foot.”

                “Command told me.” She glanced about, taking in the house. It showed signs of having been hastily evacuated by the original occupants. A few belongings- odds and ends of clothing, a very sad-looking rag doll, a bit of broken crockery- still lay scattered about, untouched by the pair who had taken refuge here. Most importantly, she saw that someone- most likely Peggy- had nailed a couple of heavy old blankets over the shuttered window to block any light from inside. She’d moved them aside to give Daria that glint of light that had led her here.   “After I get some rest and something to eat, I should be able to get you both out of here. I didn’t see any planes, and those foot patrols shouldn’t spot anything in the sky with how dark it is. I just hope your lad isn’t afraid of heights.”

                “We’ll see.” Peggy nodded towards the next room, a kitchen judging by the light and smell of food coming from it. “I haven’t exactly told him just how we were getting out.”

                “Thought it might be too much to believe, hmm?” Daria smiled wryly and padded into the kitchen, taking her first good look at the man that she and Peggy Carter had been sent to extract.

                Doctor Abraham Erskine sat by the stove with its tiny fire, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Lines creased his face, even though he didn’t seem quite that old. Stress lines, she judged. The spectacles he wore had a scratch across one lens that must have been a constant annoyance to try and see past. He looked exhausted, from physical strain and fear alike.

                Daria tilted her head slightly, frowning. There was something vaguely familiar about the shape of his jaw and nose, but she couldn’t quite seem to place why it was so familiar.

                “Doctor Erskine?” she said in careful German.  She’d made a point of learning the language years ago, back when she’d been fighting in the first Great War. Twenty-odd years later, and it was turning out to be an extremely useful skill once again.

                He started in surprise, and she realized that he’d either been half-dozing or so lost in thought he was almost entirely unaware of his surroundings.  “Forgive me, I-“ he began.

                Then he stopped, and frowned, and peered at her more closely, tilting his head a little to see past the scratch that marred his vision.

                His eyes widened. “You- I know you!” he exclaimed.

                “You do?”

                Peggy moved up beside her, pouring tea from a tin camp kettle that had been heating on the stove into a mug. “Doctor Erskine, this is my friend, Agent Daria Noclaf. She’s going to get us out of here.”

                Erskine nodded fervently, his expression breaking out into a look of relief and, surprisingly, complete trust. “Yes,” he said. “She will. I do not know if you remember, Agent Noclaf, but almost forty years ago, when the Fantom had my family kidnapped to assure my father would cooperate and work on analyzing the samples he wished to weaponize and sell, you and your League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came and rescued us. I remember you…”

                She stared at him. “Yes…” she said faintly. “Of course I remember that. The families of all his scientists were kept locked up to make them behave. I helped free them… You were one of them?”

                Again that nod. “You and the Indian man in blue, and the beast. I saw the way you changed form. I had no idea you were still alive, much less dream that you were coming to get us across the border.”

                “I had no idea that I was coming to rescue one of those children.” She smiled weakly. “Well. Alright. Not exactly a child anymore.”

                In truth, she was marveling that any of those children would want to become scientists after that experience.  When she’d been first assigned to Earth forty years before, it had been partly to investigate the operations of a man calling himself the Fantom, who had been kidnapping brilliant scientists and breaking into high-security facilities across Europe. He’d wanted to stir up a world war and sell his proprietary weapons and technology to all sides, wanting to build himself a fortune. She’d joined a team the British government had put together, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in order to further her hunt and track down the two Tau’ka allied with the Fantom.

                What the League, made up of a group of people with truly remarkable abilities, had not been aware of at the time was that the very man who had recruited them, M, was in fact the Fantom himself. Both names were false, of course. M, the Fantom, both were identities created by a truly notorious criminal mastermind named Moriarty. He’d assembled the League so he could set his agent among them and steal what made them special, in order to recreate those abilities and sell them to warring governments.

                It was a bitterly cruel and clever plan, when all was said and done. They nearly didn’t figure it out in time to save their own lives. Moriarty’s agent had set bombs all about the Captain Nemo’s submersible ship, the _Nautilus_ , and they had gone off, tearing great holes in her hull. They’d been meant to die deep beneath the ocean’s surface, while Dorian Gray made off with his stolen samples.

                And what samples he had stolen. He’d taken photographs of the _Nautilus’s_ inner workings, stolen samples of their invisible thief’s skin, Dr. Jekyll’s transformative elixir, and blood samples from both Daria herself and their resident vampire, Wilhelmina Harker.

                Daria shuddered to think what would have happened if those samples had actually gotten into the hands of governments desperate to win a war at any cost. She’d already seen the terrible things human scientists could concoct that those same governments would employ in the field without a moment of hesitation. A pack of vampiric assassins, of invisible agents, of wickedly enthusiastic and brutal Edward Hydes, could have caused as much damage as any mustard gas attack.

                And if, stars forbid, those scientists had unlocked the secrets in her blood and somehow managed to give all the strength and powers of a Tau’ka to human soldiers…

                She didn’t want to think about that. Shapeshifting and mindspeech were just two of the powerful abilities that appeared among her people. Telekinesis, the ability to conjure fire or ice or lightning, the ability to disappear from one place and reappear in another, all of those powers showed up in her immediate family alone.  Humans who weren’t used to such powers and were then pressured by their leaders to use them to wage war…

                Or worse, if they were already inclined to such things themselves…

                Such an empowered human could tear a great swath through their enemies, almost entirely unopposed.

                Daria shook herself out of her wool-gathering and accepted the cup Peggy pressed into her hands.  “I’ll get you both out of here,” she promised them.  “I’m just more surprised to be rescuing you _again_ than anything else, Dr. Erskine. I would have thought that after Mongolia, you would want to keep your head down.”

                “Science,” he said with a weak smile. “Even with the risks, it is a noble pursuit to try and make the world better. I do not want to offer my discoveries to the Fuhrer.  Only a fool would believe that he serves any but his own interests anymore. He would use what I have created to only wage further war on the world.”

                “Which is exactly why the Allies have agreed to give you asylum,” Peggy said. “They don’t want your discoveries in his hands either, or in those of that Schmidt fellow.”

                A haunted look crossed Erskine’s face at those words, and he nodded. “He is already bad enough, with the flawed formula he demanded of me. I can only hope I will be permitted to do something that will counter the evil he is committing.”

                Daria had heard of Schmidt. He was heading some deep Nazi think tank, developing new weapons technologies to supply the German forces. There were whispers of worse things, however…

“Save the briefing for later,” she suggested to him. “Right now, our goal is to get across the border without getting caught, and then to the nearest Allied camp. That’ll be the British one, a bit north of Berne. It won’t be an easy flight, but I can get us there in a couple of hours.”

“You’re sure you can manage us both?” Peggy asked. “I know you’ve carried a single person that far, but there are two of us, and we have all of Dr. Erskine’s notes with us.” She nodded to the rucksack sitting half-hidden just behind the doctor. It fairly bulged, the outlines of notebooks just visible against the worn brown fabric. 

Daria took stock of herself. She’d gotten some rest before flying over from the British camp, and she hadn’t actually had to fly there in the first place. She had made far longer flights with a single rider and equipment, which made her reasonably confident that she could get two the fifty miles or so to safety. 

“I can certainly get us across the hot zone,” she replied. “If I get tired, we can put down somewhere past the border patrols. I marked them fairly well coming out this way. But I’m not about to leave you to try and get out on your own if I can help it, Peggy.”

Leave Peggy to get out on foot by herself? No, absolutely not, unless it were a dire emergency. The look the other agent gave her warned her that if an emergency  _did_  come up, she would accept no arguments on the subject. Their mission was to get Erskine over to their side, and if the worst happened, Peggy would make sure he got away with Daria. She didn’t need to say a word.

For her part, Daria didn’t need to say that if the worst did happen, she would get Erskine to safety and turn right back around to get Peggy out too.

Some things didn’t need to be spoken of aloud. A Tau’ka’s loyalty to her friends was one of them. 

Peggy gave her a satisfied nod of approval. “Then it’s settled. We’ll clean up and get out of here before any German patrols get the oh-so-inconvenient idea to come nose around the village.” Putting deed to word, she set about cleaning up the bit of mess that she and Erskine had made. There wasn’t much. Peggy was always very careful about leaving minimal sign of her presence.

Finishing her tea, Daria left her cup on the table and went outside again. Though she was still warmed up from her first flight, she wanted to do some stretches before she carried Peggy and Erskine back to the camp. Straining something now would be a very bad thing. She shifted easily from her own form to that of the gryphon, sighing a little in something like contentment. This shape was one she loved, and it fit her like a second skin. No matter that the gryphon was far larger than a person, or had six limbs instead of four. No matter that it had fur and feathers both, or eyes so sharp they compared to almost nothing else. It  _fit_ , and she loved it.

She carefully stretched herself out, giving her wings a few experimental beats to work out any stiffness that might have set in, digging her talons into the gaps between the cobbles and leaning back, stretching the way a cat would to ease any kinks in her spine. 

“Oh.” 

Daria glanced over. Erskine had come outside, and was watching her with wide eyes. She saw no trace of fear on his face, only wonder.

_Well. I did save him and a bunch of other youngsters while wearing this shape. And he probably figured out that I am hardly a slave to the mind of whatever animal form I’m in, based on what he saw._

Her beak opened partway in a gryphonic grin, and she fluffed her feathers much like a pleased bird would. “Come herrre,” she said. There were several species of birds that could mimic human speech with surprising accuracy. Gryphons, she’d learned long ago, were quite linguistically flexible, even for something mostly built like a bird. It made things very convenient, and tended to startle her human allies less than speaking to them directly in their minds.

Less being the operative word. He still jumped a little at the unexpected words, but approached carefully. 

“I need ssssomeone to check my harrrnesss,” she explained. “Make sssure everything issss in itss prrroper place before we fly.”

“Harness?”

She edged over to him, raising a wing so he could better see the harness, made of sturdy leather and nylon mesh straps, which looped around her wings and shoulders and chest. The straps were studded with rings, and more straps could be used to buckle on packs of supplies, while others just ended in loops to secure a rider’s feet. “Check them, please. Anything that sssseems worn will need to be rrepairrred before we go.”

Patiently, she walked him through how to inspect the various straps and buckles and rings of the harness, then had him fetch a smaller harness out of a pack on her flank. This was meant for a rider to wear, with nylon straps that went around the waist and thighs, and would clip on to the harness that she wore. 

“We can’t have you falling off, now can we?” she teased. Erskine smiled crookedly. 

“I wouldn’t want to fall off, either,” he admitted. “Why can you not check your harness for yourself?”

“I do,” she told him. “Assss besst assss I am able. I can feel when a ssstrrrap iss twissted, forrr example. But I cannot manage fine adjusstmentss while in this shape. Sssee?”

She held up a front foot for his inspection. A gryphon’s foreclaw was somewhere between a human hand and a bird of prey’s foot in design, with relatively flexible fingers and a powerful opposable thumb, each digit ending in a three-inch-long talon. “It isss hard to adjussst a ssstrap with clawsss like these!” She grinned. “Ssso wheneverrr I intend to take thisss forrm, I have a human parrrtnerr help me.”

Erskine nodded slowly, and he looked oddly thoughtful- and more disturbingly, uneasy. She tilted her head. What was he thinking about? What was going on inside that scientist brain of his?

Whatever it was, he did not seem particularly inclined to share. More was the pity, but she wasn’t exactly of a mind to stop and interrogate him right now. They had things to do. Namely, get out of here.

“Put that ruckssack on,” she ordered. “You will be rrriding in frront.” She cocked her head to one side. “Do you know how to rride?”

To her vast amusement, he gave her a very dry look. “Of course. I rode every day, growing up in a _city._ Why, it was my very favorite thing.”

Daria chortled a laugh, her bronze-colored feathers rousing. “Alrright, alrright!” she chuckled. “Then it will be all the better, having you ride in frront. Peggy can help you hang on.” Giving her harness a last shake to make sure no feathers were caught under the straps, she crouched in front of him. “Jussst behind the wing-shoulder, not in front. Clip on to the rrrings of yourrr harnesss on the wide ssstrap around my neck.”

He obeyed, clipping on as instructed and listening as she explained how he would need to shift his weight to match hers as they flew, so he would not throw off her balance. He only paused a moment before doing so, giving her a questioning look that Daria interpreted as him realizing how potentially awkward this situation might be, climbing onto the back of a woman he’d only just met, no matter that she had shifted into the form of a mythological beast. “Is this the first time you’ve done something like this?” he asked, casting an uneasy glance up at the sky. “Won’t someone see us from the ground?”

“This issn’t the first time I’ve flown a night run with a rrriderr.” She turned back to look at him, and pointed out the straps meant for him to hold onto. “And I’ve sssmuggled plenty of defectorsss acrosss borderrss in my time. I am ssmallerrr than a plane or a balloon, and fasst, and ssofterrr than metal, sso rradarr will have a hard time picking me up. I carrry no lightss to betrray my presssance, and there isss little moon tonight. Againssst a dark ssky, I am harrrd to ssee. And I am farrr quieter than any plane.”

“She’s carried me across borders before,” Peggy added. She came out of the small cottage with her own rucksack slung onto her back. “She does all the hard work. All we have to do is hang on, and keep an eye on the ground in case we spot something she misses. Not likely- right now her eyesight is far better than ours.”

“Flatterrerrr.”

“It’s a good thing I know you aren’t actually so vain.” She smiled, and reached up to scratch behind her ears and beneath the crest of long red-and-black feathers that extended from the back of her head. Daria leaned into her friend’s fingers with a loud purr, eyes sliding shut in sheer pleasure. Peggy worked briefly down along her jaw and under her beak, then lowered her hand and mounted up behind Erskine. She clipped on, and patted her flank. “I’m ready. Let’s get out of here-“

Daria raised her head sharply, her ears pricking forward. From just north of the village rose the sound of dogs, baying that they had found a scent. She bristled and hissed, looking back at Peggy. “They’re tracking you?”

“We knew they were hunting us! They didn’t have dogs earlier!”

“Schmidt must have ordered a full search,” Erskine said. “The last thing he would want is for me to escape.”

“We’ll jusst have to dissappoint him, then.” Daria peered off towards the sound of the dogs, trying to judge how far they were. They were certainly closing in quite fast, and they were indeed moving straight towards the village, following whatever scent trail Erskine and Peggy had left. “Hold on.”

Rather than take directly to the air, she hurried across the ground at a lope. She wanted to get closer to the trees before she risked gaining any sort of altitude. A large flying shape in empty air might be noticed, where if they were against a backdrop of trees when she took off they ought to have more camouflage. Her talons clicked on the cobblestones, and the jingling of her harness seemed almost terrifyingly loud. Thankfully, Erskine had managed to grab on to a strap, rather than any of her feathers, and he was whispering something in German under his breath she didn’t bother to listen to.

Behind them, the baying grew louder, and she picked out the raised voices of men beneath the dogs. They shouted orders to one another. Three men, she decided, sitting back almost on her heels and fanning her wings to slow herself enough she could dash around a corner without going tail-over-beak. She could make out three distinct voices back there giving orders. That meant there were more, the soldiers they were giving orders _to_.

 _Are they only coming from one direction?_ she wondered. _They can’t possibly have the village surrounded, can they?_ As much noise as she was making, she wouldn’t hear men moving around the outskirts of the village. _Get to the trees. Fly low over them until we’re well out of range. Hope you’re lucky._

She absolutely hated relying upon luck.

She bounded over the bridge that arched across the stream, stumbling a little as her talons slipped. On her back, Erskine and Peggy lurched, fighting to keep from sliding to one side or the other. Or rather, Peggy was. Erskine seemed too busy simply hanging on for dear life.

_“Da sind sie!”_

A pair of German soldiers she had not seen or heard approaching rounded a corner onto the street directly in front of them. One held a torch, casting its yellowish light directly into their faces while the other grabbed for the rifle slung over his shoulder.

 _“Was ist das?_ ” The soldier with the torch went very pale in shock at the sight of a gryphon charging down the street directly at them. Most humans simply weren’t psychologically prepared to handle the concept of an enormous winged predator the size of a horse. His companion, made of slightly sterner stuff, did manage to raise his rifle and point it more or less in their direction, though the muzzle wavered.

“Daria!” Peggy shouted.

“Hold on!” She covered the last distance between them and the soldiers in a leap, wings spread, and lashed out with a taloned front foot to knock the rifle away. Her riders lurched, Erskine hastily wrapping his arms around her neck to stay in his seat, while Peggy cursed. The German soldier didn’t have time to do much more than scream. Several bullets sprayed across the cobbles, sending shards of stone flying and making the humans yelp.

Pinning the soldier beneath her, she ducked her head and bit through his throat with her hooked beak, cutting his screams off into a wet gurgle that quickly rasped to nothingness. Then she pivoted on her hind feet to face the other soldier, voicing a screech of rage and challenge. If he raised a hand to them she would kill him, just like she killed the first man, tear into his flesh and leave him bleeding on the stones, because no one would get in her way now-

He apparently had a sense of self-preservation, for he didn’t attempt to stand against her. He simply dropped his torch, turned, and ran screaming into the night, shouting about “ _Ein monster!”_

She crouched, preparing to spring after him and give chase, run him down like prey, rip into him and spill his blood and-

A sharp pain in her flank drew her back to her senses.

“He’s running!” Peggy shouted. She kicked Daria’s flank again, her booted heel striking almost hard enough to bruise. “Let him go and don’t waste time!”

She blinked, shaking off the bloodlust that had risen in her. That was the problem with shapeshifting- some instincts could rise up and affect her. Anything like birds of prey, or gryphons, brought with them the risk of becoming too focused on the hunt and kill to the exclusion of rationality. When Peggy kicked her a third time, more forcefully, she shook her head and turned to keep running to the edge of the village. There were more shouts from the Germans, more voices raised over the howls and baying of their dogs.

Another soldier ran onto the main road from a cross street as they passed, his rifle raised. A shot rang out, the sound smaller and clearer than that of the Germans’ weapons. The soldier jerked once and collapsed in a heap, Peggy’s bullet leaving a round, bleeding hole above his right eye.

At last, the buildings of the town fell away, and the forest rose up before them, dark and foreboding. Once more Daria gathered herself, shifted her weight back on her hind feet, and leaped into the air with all her strength. Erskine lurched, falling back against Peggy at the sudden shift, as she beat her wings as hard as she could.

The ground fell away beneath them, branches racing straight for them until she managed to gain enough height that they did no more than brush against her legs. Still she clawed for height, muscles burning with the strain of lifting her and her two riders.

Erskine was muttering under his breath in rather frantic German. Something about how he’d changed his mind, he wouldn’t have minded walking out of Germany. Really. Walking would have been just fine. Daria didn’t bother to talk to him, instead preferring to save her breath for flying. She kept low, low enough that her claws skimmed over the treetops at some points, knowing she would be much harder to see if anyone had figured out where they’d gone.

She felt Peggy twist, turning back to watch the village as they flew away. “I can still see their torches,” she said. “But I don’t think they really know what happened. There will be some interesting stories going around their camp tomorrow though, especially when they see the bodies.”

Well, she had hardly wanted to risk letting that soldier shoot her, or worse, Erskine or Peggy. What was she supposed to have done, just knocked him over and risk him getting up to shoot at them from behind?

Besides, if the Germans suddenly thought there were very large, very _pointy_ monsters lurking in the night, they might curtail some of their activities. She had absolutely zero problem with that.

They fell quiet for a while, letting the worse of their adrenaline wear off. Daria just kept flying, head straight and level, trying to put cover as much distance as possible. She’d studied the maps of the area until she’d thought her eyes would go crossed from the strain of trying to read the tiny writings in among all the other lines and symbols. They would fly due southwest for about ten miles before veering straight south to avoid a couple of camps on the border, then make a dash westwards to the British camp that was their destination. With luck, they wouldn’t come across any patrols until they had to swing south to go around those border camps.

For now, the skies were quiet, with no noise except the steady beating of Daria’s wings and the wind whipping at Erskine’s and Peggy’s clothing. She could feel him shivering, though, and before long she turned her head to look at him.

“Are you alrrright?” she asked over the wind, trying to put as much concern in her voice as she could. He nodded, but she could see the way his teeth chattered a little.

“It is a bit chilly,” Peggy pointed out. “How far have we gotten?”

She tallied up an approximation of the time she’d been in the air after a moment’s thought. “Perrhapsss five milesss,” she told her. “No more than that.” She and Peggy both knew that Erskine’s shivers were probably as much from shock as they were from the cold.

“Can we risk stopping?”

“No!” Erskine protested, looking between them. “No, I am fine, truly… Agent Carter is correct, it is just colder up here than I expected.”

She eyed him closely before relenting. “Tell usss if you feel faint orrr ill,” she said sternly. “I will find a place forrr usss to resst.”

“But we can’t stop!” His fingers tightened on the neck strap of her harness. “We shouldn’t fly during the day- should we?”

Peggy shook her head. “We really shouldn’t try to fly by day. I really don’t fancy having to fly in cloud cover. We’d be wet and chilled within minutes, and the longer it takes us to get back, the more risk there will be of discovery.”

Then there was no question. This close to the border, they would have to keep going. Daria sighed and looked forward again, putting her head down and willing more strength into her wings. She almost wished they were flying by day- if they were, she might be able to find a nice thermal or updraft to help ease her exertions a little.  That would be nice.

The trees passed underneath them, occasionally giving way to meadows, hills and valleys, occasionally criss-crossed by train tracks or roads. One of the train tracks wound more or less in the direction she needed to go, so she followed it for a time, because the lighter ground passing by below helped her to judge the distance and made it feel less like she was flying over an endless black ocean. Only when she spotted the light of a train approaching did she wheel away from the cleared strip of land the track followed. Her passengers were quiet, and had been for a time. Peggy, she knew, would be watching the ground as intently as she was, no matter that she couldn’t see as well in the dark. Erskine…

She had no idea what Erskine was thinking. Every time she glanced back to check on them, he was huddled down against her neck, hands buried under her feathers for warmth, his face set in stubborn, grim lines. None of them, she knew, would relax until they had reached the safety of their own lines, and their own camp.

As it should be. Out here, they had to be alert. One sentry spotting a silhouette against the sky could be all it took to lead them to capture, torture, and death. Not that Daria would ever let them fall into enemy hands without a fight.

She only hoped she wouldn’t have to fall back on the emergency orders she’d been given to make sure Erskine didn’t fall back into German hands.  She rather liked him, and having to kill people she knew and liked always made her feel sick inside.

When she spotted the lights of the border camp, she wheeled to the left, banking sharply south to avoid it. They had search lights up, meant to try and spot Allied planes attempting to sneak across their lines. The big devices sent beams of light, like glowing lances, dancing across the sky, ready to illuminate anything in their airspace. But things stayed quiet, so she kept the camp at her tail and hurried southwards, where the sky remained dark and clear.

By the time she had gone far enough that she could cut back west again, dawn was beginning to lighten the sky behind them. Occasional checks had shown that Erskine had somehow managed to nod off, still clinging tightly to her flight harness. Peggy was still awake, and smiled a little in the growing light. 

“Are we nearly there?” she asked, just loudly enough to be heard over the wind.

“Nearrly. We should be able to sssee the camp ssoon.” She banked a little, finding a nice westerly breeze to make her going a little easier. By now, her wings and back and chest ached from the strain. She was going to feel pummeled when they finally landed, both from the exertion and the rather uncomfortable way her passengers had bounced and jostled against her spine while she’d been running through the village. Gryphons were not exactly meant to be ridden, despite their strength, and they certainly weren’t built to carry human-sized riders while on foot. Oh, a few of her people had tamed some of the gryphons who lived on her homeworld, had even trained a few to permit a rider, but that was for flying only.

She had always loved seeing the gryphons with their riders as a child. The great creatures were excellent companions, and very clever, though no one sane wanted to get on their bad side. That way tended to lie laceration and dismemberment. Tau’ka healed very quickly, but even they had limits to what they could recover from.

Her mind was wandering, she realized, and shook her head to clear it. She must be tired, if she was woolgathering in the middle of a flight. Each wingbeat was costing more and more in the way of effort, almost as if she were having to claw her way through molasses rather than thin air.

_The next time I say I can fly two people almost fifty miles at the same time without it being a problem, I should remember this. Or at the very least, I should spend a lot more time flying and get myself in better condition before I go and be silly enough to offer to make the attempt!_

At last, at long, long last, she spotted the broad meadow where the English  had their camp. It was neat and orderly, with tents lined up in precise, exacting lines. The commander had not permitted the soldiers under his command to leave trash or other debris along the ‘roads’ the rows of tents ran along, though the grass had been well trodden into the dirt by the constant coming and goings of soldiers in their sturdy boots and their trucks. Mist had risen during the night, softening the edges of everything and seeming to glow a little in the dawn light.

She banked then, to fly along the edges of the camp as she voiced a sharp, chattering call to identify herself to the guards standing watch. That drew more eyes than just those of the guards. The handful of soldiers already outside looked up, pointing towards her, and others stuck their heads out of their tents to see for themselves. Quite a few of these men had seen her the night before, when she’d left to make the flight into Germany, but not all of them.

And even those who had seen her weren’t _used_ to seeing her shapeshift and fly off as a gryphon. At least they, unlike the German soldiers, knew that the huge flying predator was on _their_ side.

“I almost forgot,” Peggy said, giving Erskine a nudge to wake him up. “When we land, if you speak about Daria, don’t refer to her as female.”

Daria cast a quick glance back over her shoulder. He was giving Peggy a puzzled look.

“She dresses as a man when she’s working with the army,” she explained.

“I have worrrk to do,” Daria said. “Peggy chooses to do hersss in spite of idiotss not taking herrr ssseriousssly because she isss a woman. More foolsss they, she’ss worth twelve of any of them. I choose not to even engage in that kind of fight when I can avoid it.”

She had lived on Earth for almost forty years, and even after so long she was still sickened and dismayed at how so many humans ignored and demeaned their women- there were even women who treated their fellows so! It angered her to see it, and she knew that if she had to constantly deal with military and intelligence leaders who would ignore and dismiss her for the simple fact of not being male, she would not only be unable to get them to give her work she _needed_ to take on because she was simply the best qualified, she would be too angry to get anything else accomplished. Instead, she dressed as a man, with her hair cut short and her breasts bound flat under her clothing. Her breeding gave her a significant advantage over a human woman in that regard. Tau’ka had been bred as warriors, for strength and speed and agility far surpassing that of any human, and that genetic engineering had pushed them to a particular body type: lean, with deep chests and broad shoulders even in the females, very defined muscles, and powerful hands and limbs. Because of their high metabolisms, Tau’ka tended to carry very little in the way of body fat, so females tended not to have the soft curves of their human sisters unless they had a lot of pure human in their ancestry. So by human standards, Daria did not look particularly feminine, and with her reddish hair cut to the level of her ears and her breasts bound most humans easily mistook her for a man. Since they treated her in accordance with that mistaken assumption and gave her the unthinking respect for having a brain and being capable they would give any man, she took shameless advantage of the blind spot in their thinking.

Peggy did not entirely approve of Daria’s tactic of avoiding the deep sexism she herself faced, but she did at least admit that it was reasonably effective. For her part, Daria made a point of being very vocal in support of her fellow agent, and she’d stepped in to help Peggy dress down more than one idiot who thought Peggy couldn’t handle one task or another.

More often, that took the form of simply blocking the fool’s escape route and watching Peggy tear into him. Anyone who disregarded a woman’s capabilities simply because she was a woman more than deserved what he got.

“What do I call you, then?” Erskine asked.

“Darrrian,” she told him, giving him another of those open-beaked gryphon grins. “Darrian Noclaf. I trrry to keep these thingsss sssimple.”

“Darian,” he repeated, and nodded. “That will be easy enough to remember.”

She chirped and spotted one of the guards waving her in to land, indicating a field where the soldiers would do basic drills and exercises. Putting her head down, she glided towards it, dropping low enough over the tents that one man who was sitting outside one trying to shave yelped and dropped his razor in the little basin of water he was using as she passed barely a yard over his head. His companions laughed at his misfortune, though it had the slightly hysterical edge that said she was making them nervous. She finally touched down in the middle of the field, her talons just brushing the battered grass before she flared her wings to slow herself and lit gently upon the turf.

“Help him down, Peggy,” she said. “Keep him sssteady.”

“I assure you I’m quite fine,” Erskine protested, almost immediately before he groaned in a mix of dismay and pain when he tried to climb off her back. He wasn’t used to riding, as he had told her himself, and she knew that the muscles of his legs and hips and back had to be tied in a truly spectacular array of knots after their night-long flight.  Peggy steadied him quickly before he could fall, then removed the packs strapped to Daria’s harness.

As soon as she had, Daria shifted back to her own shape and bit back a groan of her own. As she had predicted, she felt absolutely pummeled from the grueling flight. And _starving_. Peggy looked at her critically as she swayed a little on her feet. “I’ll make the report to the commander,” she said briskly. “You have a tent, yes? I’ll have an orderly bring you something to eat, and then you go and get some sleep.”

Daria nodded gratefully. Peggy would smooth things over so she could give her debriefing later. Besides, she’d only been involved in the mission for the last part of it. Peggy’s information would be a lot more important than anything she had to provide.

                Her work was done for now. There would be more for her to do soon enough.


	2. Buying Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the delay. Winter quarter is always hell for me and I've only just recovered.
> 
> This was a scene I simply couldn't resist writing when the idea occurred to me.

Chapter Two: Buying Time

_February, 1941_

_London_

Daria retied her scarf, trying to block the little thread of icy air that insisted on insinuating itself through her clothing to her skin. _Bloody English weather._ For once it wasn’t raining- at the moment. There were fat, heavy clouds hanging in the darkening sky that threatened rain, and the cold that nipped at her ears and nose had that edge of dampness to it that went right to her bones.   As she waited for Peggy and argued with her clothing, which seemed to be particularly uninclined to cooperate and block the cold, she listened to her surroundings.  Things were quiet at the moment, people hurrying home at the end of another day under the darkening sky.  She watched a mother herding a gaggle of children along the road. They were all carrying packages, the children clearly having been pressed into service to help their mother carry the groceries.

She smiled at the woman. “Got all the little ducklings?” she called cheerfully.  The woman did bear an amusing resemblance to a mother duck with her fluffy little offspring trooping along in her wake in a messy but mostly coherent row.

“Oh, I think so,” the woman replied with a smile. “Of course, the moment I take my eye off one, they’ll be off, straight into a mud puddle.”

Daria laughed. Ana had been much the same as a child. “That they will, and no amount of scolding will stop them the _next_ time they see one!”

“Truer words were never spoken.” The woman laughed and returned to the task of making sure exactly that didn’t happen, and only just in time.  A boy with dark hair and far, far too much mischief in his green eyes was already lagging back, his gaze fixed on a too-tempting puddle. He pouted as his mother came to chivvy him along, and the whole family trotted off around the corner and out of sight.

She didn’t have much longer to wait. Peggy came out of the building, her umbrella tucked under one arm. “There you are, darling. I’m so sorry, did I keep you waiting long?”

“Not that long.” She hugged her in greeting, returning the brief kiss on the cheek Peggy gave her.

“Your frozen nose says otherwise.”

“I’m always cold in winter, Peg.”

“Mmm. Yes, that’s true.” Peggy smiled wryly, and they fell into pace with one another, ambling off down the street towards the old townhouse that served the League as a headquarters and as home for most of the members. Daria was one of those who still lived there full-time when she wasn’t off on an assignment.

As she was at the moment. She’d recently come back from a mission in France, sabotaging a munitions factory the Nazis had claimed when they had taken over, and was back in London awaiting new orders after giving her reports.

Peggy was now staying at the League’s townhouse as well. A month previously, her little flat had been hit by bombs. Rather than letting her friend scramble to find other accommodations in the city or let her have to figure out how to find somewhere outside city limits and then travel to the office she reported to when not in the field, Daria had offered to let her stay with her. The arrangement was suiting both of them rather well, and the few staff still at the townhouse appreciated having another person about to keep the place from feeling so empty. The League was often away on assignment themselves- last she’d heard, they were nosing around in Russia.

They chatted about mundane things as they walked, simply content to enjoy one another’s company. This part of London had so far escaped the bombings, and it was nice to not walk past a ruined wreck of a building, to just take a few moments and not think about the tragedies all around them.

“There’s another young lady we’ve recruited,” Peggy was saying as they passed a tiny park that had been turned over to a vegetable garden the previous season. “I think she’ll make a fine agent, she certainly has the nerves for it. She hasn’t so much as twitched at some of the stories the men have been telling not-so-inconspicuously within her hearing.”

“Will I get to meet this one?” Daria grinned. “You sent your last one off to manage the Auxiliaries in Southampton before I even got to say so much as hello.”

“Only because she was ready sooner than I thought! No, if you’re still here, I’ll make sure I introduce you.  I think you’d like her.”

“You said that about the last girl you helped train too.”

“Darling, it’s hardly my fault if they keep you hopping so much I barely get to see you, much less get a chance to introduce you to people.”

Daria pretended to pout at that and slipped her hand into Peggy’s, who squeezed it gently. “Yes, well, I go where they send me, have to do my bit and all. It’s just nice to catch a breather at home…”

“Even if it isn’t as peaceful as we might like.” Peggy glanced up at the sky. Daria did the same, instinctively scanning the clouds for any sign of danger.

“An understatement if I ever heard one,” she said with a shiver.  For now, at least, the skies were clear.

They fell quiet for a moment, the mood broken.

“Oh, I found those books you were interested in,” Daria said at last, trying to shake off the grim feeling that had settled over them. They rounded the corner, and she noticed the mother and gaggle of small children she’d spoken to earlier. “Those novels? They had gotten moved to the attic, that’s why they weren’t where I thought they were.”

Peggy brightened. “Wonderful! I can’t wait to read them. They sounded delightful from what you were telling me-“

The wail of the air raid siren swallowed what she was going to say next. Both women looked up. From where they stood, buildings blocked their view of the horizon, but there was no way to hide the knowledge of what was coming.

The Luftwaffe.

The children had frozen in terror at the sound of the siren, dropping their parcels in the street. She and Peggy saw it at the same time, saw the mother cry out and try to gather her offspring so they could get to safety. Their purchases seemed to have been forgotten in the scramble.

They exchanged a glance, nodded, and moved.

“Here!” Peggy called. She ran up and snatched up the smallest of the four children in her arms. In her wake, Daria scooped up the next two. “Our place is close- grab those packages and run!”

Her words seemed to galvanize the woman. She and the eldest child, a boy of about thirteen, grabbed the packages the younger children had dropped. It might seem foolish to risk staying out in the open long enough to pick them up, but if those were food purchases, they probably represented quite a lot of the family’s weekly allotment of rationed goods that they would have a very hard time replacing.

Daria nodded to Peggy and took off at a run, holding the children close. Peggy and the children’s mother and brother followed as quickly as they could with their own burdens. The hard soles of her shoes clacked on the cobbled streets, loud enough to be heard over the sirens and the sounds of people shouting and scrambling to get into shelters before the Germans started raining bombs down on them.

_They’re getting clever, coming in the cloud cover while it’s still light enough to see their targets. The first wave will be able to see where to drop the incendiaries. I don’t know if the Starfish decoys will be able to lure the bombers away from the city with false fire signals._

Around one last corner, and she spotted the tall grey townhouse that sat by the river, surrounded by a little strip of muddy yard-turned-garden. The house’s tiny staff- the cook with her own gaggle of children, the maid-of-all-work, and their secretary, who’d been mustered out of the army when splinters from a grenade had gone septic and required his left leg be amputated- were all stumbling through the front door. They were headed for the cellar, and only one of the children happened to glance up and spot Daria sprinting up to them with the two little boys in her arms.

“Here!” she shouted. She didn’t stop to open the wrought-iron garden gate properly, just shifted her weight and gave it a vicious kick. The old latch popped free of its moorings and the gate shot open with a clang. She had to twist as she passed through, catching it on her shoulder as it bounced back towards her so it wouldn’t strike the little boy. Sprinting up the path, she skidded to a halt as Mrs. Harding all but snatched one of the children from her arms to help him inside.

“Where’s Miss Peggy?” the cook asked, glancing fearfully at the sky.

“She’s right behind me, with these little ones’ siblings and mother- we had them come here, we knew this was closest-“

“Yes, yes, of course.”  She hurried her children and the boy she’d taken from Daria into the cellar.

Daria helped the others inside, and they had only just clambered down the steep stairs when Peggy raced up the garden path with the rest of the family in tow. 

“Everybody inside, quickly,” the dark-haired agent said. She set down the child she carried and glanced at the sky. Now they could hear the engines of the German planes over the siren. Cocking her head to listen, she frowned. “Daria, I only hear the German planes, and I think they’re coming right this way.”

“The RAF hasn’t gotten in the air yet?” She bit back a curse, one fueled as much by fear as frustration for the RAF’s perceived slowness. The League’s headquarters had once been the riverside home of Dorian Gray, Moriarty’s agent in their midst. They had taken it over after their first mission, after Mina had slain the traitor. Over the last few decades, factories had been creeping into the neighborhood around the old building, and Daria knew that one good firebomb in the wrong place among them would be disastrous. If the RAF didn’t get here in time…

“I’m going up.”

Peggy stared at her with the kind of expression one normally used when looking at someone who had just said something _monumentally_ idiotic. “Clearly I’m being deafened by those sirens, because I thought I just heard you say you were going up there.”

“No, you heard right. I can buy a bit of time.”

Peggy grabbed her wrist, eyes full of concern.  “If one of them hits you-“

She pulled her into a quick, tight hug before drawing back. “I’ll be as careful as I can,” she promised. “I’ll still be a lot smaller and more agile than they are.”

Daria turned to leave, only for Peggy to draw her back again. “Wait,” she said, and pulled her into a firm kiss.

The Tau’ka’s eyes widened a little in surprise, but she only hesitated a moment before kissing Peggy back.  It was a proper kiss, fierce and sweet, speaking more than words would. Oh, she and Peggy were close, and had been for several years now, but this was a little unexpected.

Not that Daria objected in the _slightest_. She’d been entertaining more than a little interest in Peggy for some time, but hadn’t wanted to move before she knew Peggy’s interest was similar.

They would need to discuss this later. When they weren’t about to be bombarded by the German air force.

“I’ll come back,” she promised, pressing a kiss of her own on Peggy’s forehead. “Get inside where you’ll be safe.”

Reluctantly, Peggy did so, hurrying down the cellar stairs and closing the door behind her, leaving Daria standing in the yard.

 _Time to get to work_.

It took no more than a breath to slide into her favorite shape and shake herself out. She beat her wings a few times to warm up the muscles, flexed her talons in their knife-like metal war sheathes,  then leaped upwards, clawing for height.

As the city fell away beneath her, she caught her first glimpse of the German bombers. They came in great V-shaped formations like horrific metal geese, the last light of dusk glinting off their fuselages.  These were the first wave of aeroplanes, the ones that would rain incendiaries on the city to light the way for bombers behind them and mark out their targets. She counted several groups as she flew high above them, wanting the advantage of superior height. Bomber pilots were first concerned with what was on the ground below them; she hoped that would mean they weren’t keeping as close an eye on what was above them as they really ought.

She caught a breeze coming in off the Channel and kited on it just below the heavy cloud cover, watching the bombers approach. She wasn’t a fool, she knew she would only be able to engage a few of the planes at most. But if she could distract them, cause a little chaos that diverted them from their real mission until the RAF could get here and engage them properly, she would consider it a job well done.  And if she could divert the planes coming in over her neighborhood, that would be best of all.

They drew ever-closer, propellers droning like the largest swarm of enraged bees to have ever existed, squadrons of bombers with a few flights of fighters flying escort above.  With deceptive swiftness, they flew in over the water, then over land, over the already-battered buildings of London, a storm of arrows shooting straight at the heart of England.

With a scream of defiant fury loud enough to be heard over propellers and sirens alike, Daria picked her target and stooped.

Ignoring the fighters in favor of striking at the more dangerous targets, she struck the lead bomber of the formation of Heinkel 111s from above, before the gunner in the dorsal turret could see her coming. The glass dome of the turret shattered beneath her, and she clawed in between the struts with a snarl. The man’s scream cut off as her talons ripped into him, but more shouts came from inside.  Daria shrieked again and wrestled herself around so she could claw her way up the fuselage to the canopy of the cockpit.

The German pilot and his forward gunner stared up at her, eyes wide in faces gone pale with terror. She struck at the canopy again with her talons extended. The needle-sharp points of the metal sheaths she wore concentrated the force of her blow, and cracks spiderwebbed out from where the tips connected.

Her victims didn’t sit idly by and let doom come to them, however. With a yell, the pilot yanked on the controls, bucking his craft into a stooping wingover that nearly tore Daria loose from where she clung. Rather than risk getting a wing or tail caught in one of the whirring propellers, she sprang free and took to the air again, leaving the bomber struggling to right itself as air dragged through the canopies she’d broken.

Beating hard, she flew skyward again and repeated her stoop on the next plane to come in range. This time she struck the cockpit canopy and snapped her wings closed to keep from being dragged off.  The nose gunner couldn’t reach her when she was literally on top of him, so she had free reign to shatter the glass and slash at the men inside. They screamed and tried to evade her talons, but were hampered by their own restraints and the narrow confines of the cockpit itself.

This time, her talons found the pilot. Slashing through his restraints, she pried him out, hauling him bodily from the cockpit as the plane lurched beneath them. He flailed at her, beating at her arm and chest in desperation. Blood oozed from deep gashes her claws had gouged into his flesh, but he didn’t stop fighting.

She had to give him some credit for bravery.  Or perhaps sheer _terror_ , the odds were pretty good it was one of the two.

With a snarl she tossed him aside and launched herself back into the air. The formation had faltered, breaking up as the pilots tried to figure out just exactly what was attacking them.  In the dark, they couldn’t see her clearly, but she could very clearly see _them._ The chatter on their radios couldn’t be helping. The survivors on the first bomber could only report that _something_ , something with very large claws and a screech like the legendary baen sidhe of Irish folklore had struck from above and killed their gunner.

The second plane- well.

As she got herself back on-station above the bombers, she watched as it crashed into the Thames, sending up a huge spray of water that shimmered in the light of an incendiary bomb one of its squadron mates had dropped on the riverfront.  The first had turned around, trying to limp back across the Channel to France and its own lines.

_That’s two down._

On her third stoop, she wasn’t quite so lucky. The bomber had been moving a bit faster than she judged, and rather than striking the cockpit or the dorsal gunner’s canopy she hit the tail. For one horrifying moment, she was right in line with the barrel of the machine gun. A twitch of the gunner’s thumbs, and she would be so much shredded meat.

She dug the talons of her right foreclaw into the fuselage, folded her wings, and flung herself sideways, rolling around the side of the tail and away from the deadly gun before the gunner could react to the sight of her clinging to the side of his plane. Metal shrieked in protest as her claws tore long gashes clear through it. She slid downwards, until she could brace her hind feet on the horizontal stabilizer.

There she clung, trying to catch her breath as the wind whipped at her eyes and feathers. A plane was a good deal faster than a gryphon could ever hope to be, and the speed threatened to tear her from her precarious perch. She had to keep her wings clamped tightly against her sides, to keep them from catching the gale.

The pilot must have realized she was still there, for this plane too began to buck and lurch as he tried to shake her off. Her foot slipped, and she slid down further with a frightened squawk that she would deny until her dying day.

As she fetched up against the rear stabilizer, though, an idea occurred to her. It had a sort of flap that helped fine-tune the plane’s balance and angle, working with the rudder to orient it in whatever direction the pilot wanted to go. She could see where the flaps joined into the structure of the stabilizer, a little awkward to get to but still vulnerable.

And from where she was, none of the guns could reach her at all- they simply couldn’t, for their mountings wouldn’t let the guns aim so close to the very craft they were mounted on. None of the other planes would be able to mount a rescue for the same reason, for fear of shooting down one of their own allies.

Daria slashed at the stabilizer flaps, shredding into the thin sheets of metal that protected those vital joints and ripping them free, only to toss them aside. The rudder was next- thicker and heavier, it resisted her claws.

 _Well fine then_. She could work with that.

She carefully shifted her hold, jamming her talons into the join of rudder to tail, and swung herself so she was facing forward, clinging to the rudder with all four sets of claws.

 _Then_ she opened her wings.

She didn’t have to open them very far at all before the gale caught them and snapped them open with enough force to make every joint and muscle in them hurt. Fighting to keep them spread wide, she clung hard to the rudder.

The joints of the rudder gave way before the joints of her wings, and it tore free from its mountings. The bomber wobbled and listed heavily to one side, slowly rolling over into a dive the pilot would not be able to pull it out of. Daria dropped the heavy piece of metal and flew back up towards the clouds once more.  Her wings ached now, making every foot of altitude hard-won. She wouldn’t be able to keep this up for much longer.

Movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. A bomber had broken off from its wing and was flying towards her, its forward gun starting to spit bullets at her. As slow as she was moving, there was little time to get her large form out of its way.

Rather than try to scramble out of the way, she folded her wings in on herself and shifted shape, dropping like a stone. Her form shrank, small enough that she seemed to all but disappear from view, and plummeted below the line of the bomber’s fire.

Being a falcon hurt a great deal less, even when she spread her wings once more and used her momentum to carry her skywards again.  Only when she was back well above the action did she change back to gryphon form. A falcon could not see well at night, though it was small enough and fast enough for brief maneuvers like the one she had just pulled.  It wouldn’t do her a bit of good against a bomber, though. Only the gryphon had the size and strength for that.

She kited on the breeze once again, taking shelter high above where she couldn’t be seen except by a chance search light from far below. Even then, she was too small to really be noticed. She was safe up here as she surveyed the situation below.

The half-dozen bomber wings, a dozen planes each, had broken formation, scattered by the demands of their offensive plan and her rather aggressive disruptions. They had already dropped a number of bombs, but broken up as they were, they couldn’t bring any real concentrated firepower onto any single target.

The surviving planes would not go unmolested for long. At long, long last, Daria heard what she had been hoping for since the air raid sirens had started going off: the engines of the RAF Spitfires, come to drive off the enemy. Now the real combat would begin, as the British pilots engaged their German counterparts. The RAF fell upon Luftwaffe fighters and bombers alike. For their part, the bombers scrambled to deliver their payloads and flee back across the Channel while their fighters engaged the British pilots to give them cover.

With planes actively starting to shoot at one another now, however, it was too dangerous for Daria to stay in the air. She didn’t want to be _anywhere_ nearby when the bullets really started flying.

She picked one last target and dropped onto it like a stone, bringing it down just as the British pilots swept into the fray.  She stayed with her plane just long enough to make sure it would go down, then broke free and shifted shape once more, this time into an eagle-owl, small and silent and able to see perfectly well in the light of the fires.

As the sound of battle thundered in the skies above London, Daria flew back towards the League’s townhouse and the safety of the cellar beneath it. She’d done her part; now it was time for others to finish the job.

She glided into the yard, shifting shape just before touching down onto the old cobbles. She stumbled a little as exhaustion suddenly hit, along with all the aches and pains that carried over from her other forms.

 _I don’t think I’m going to try that trick with the rudder ever again,_ she thought, as the muscles of her upper back chose that moment to clench and seize up painfully.

 _< Peggy?>_ she called silently. _< I made it back- open the cellar door for me?> _

Peggy wasn’t a mindspeaker herself. While she could hear Daria’s silent call, she couldn’t respond in kind. That didn’t make her any slower to throw the door open and all but drag Daria inside with the others.

“Are you alright?” she demanded, looking her over in the light of the single battery-powered lamp that had been lit.

“I’m fine.” The knots in her back and shoulders from overstrained wings argued otherwise, but she didn’t want to admit it. Peggy already worried enough about her when she flew off to do something heroic and probably not the most intelligent course of action.

The look she was giving her certainly argued that she didn’t buy the Tau’ka’s words. “You went and did something foolish, didn’t you? Honestly, when will you learn?” With the family taking refuge with them, she couldn’t speak too openly. She chose her words carefully, to give the family the impression that Daria had been outside doing something else, perhaps getting other people to safety or something of the sort.

“Probably the same day you learn not to just run off to do whatever you can to help?” _< I think I pulled something while tearing the rudder off a plane, I’ll be fine, luv.>_

Peggy eyed her again, then pulled her into a tight hug. “You and the reckless heroics,” she murmured in her ear. “Not that I’ll try to tell you not to do it again, because you won’t and I’ve no right to demand it.”

“It’s what I do.” She returned the hug just as tightly, closing her eyes. _< I broke up the formations,>_ she added silently. _< Distracted them. I took out four bombers before the RAF arrived to finish off the rest of them.>_

“Four?” Peggy whispered. “Alone? That’s- quite remarkable.” She slowly drew out of the hug. “Go sit down. We can’t do anything else right now but wait.”

Nodding, she went and took a seat on the floor with the others. There were a couple of cots crammed into the cellar space, but with the woman and her five children with them there was no room on the cots for Daria to sit. She didn’t mind, just dropped onto the floor with her back against the cold stone wall, closing her eyes. A tiny radio had been brought down here months ago when the bombings started.  Nothing was coming out of the speakers right now but static, and there wouldn’t be until the all-clear was sounded. Distantly, she could hear the sound of plane engines and machine gun fire, punctuated now and again with the deep _thump_ and muffled booms of bombs.

 _How much longer will this go on?_ she wondered as Peggy tucked a blanket around her shoulders and slid down the wall to sit next to her, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder. Daria cracked her eyes open a little and gave her a small smile.  As long as she had Peggy, things would be alright. They would get through this war.

Together.

 


	3. A Difference of Opinion

Chapter Three: Difference of Opinion

_April, 1943_

_London_

 

“You’re going where?”

Daria blinked at Peggy from where she sat across the table in the little pub they were taking lunch in. They had happened to find themselves both back in London at the same time, which was a rarity these days. MI13 kept sending Daria out into the field, much as she preferred, and MI6 likewise kept Peggy very busy. They had exchanged letters as often as they could, but they hadn’t actually gotten to see one another more than once or twice in the two years since Daria had fetched Peggy and Dr. Erskine across the border.

Dr. Erskine himself had quickly been shuffled across the Atlantic to America. The higher-ups had decided they wanted him, his brilliant mind, and the research he had smuggled out with him well away from anything resembling the front lines, and so almost as soon as they had finished their debriefings he had been shipped first across the Channel and then on to the United States. Daria hadn’t heard anything directly from him since, though her handler had told her that he was working with the newly established Strategic Scientific Reserve on some undisclosed project.

“The United States,” Peggy repeated. She toyed a little with her cup of tea. Daria had barely touched her own cup. Sugar rations had decreased again, and she wasn’t quite used to the more bitter taste of tea with less sugar in it yet. “New York, specifically. I’ve been ordered to join the SSR, reporting to Colonel Phillips. I’m leaving in three days.”

                “Oh.” Daria felt a little flicker of disappointment at that. At least when they had both been based out of London, there was a chance they might run into each other. America, though, was another matter entirely.

                On the other hand, America was very, very far from the front, and well out of reach of German bombers. It would be nice to think of her friend as being away from the chance that a bomb would fall on her home or her workplace some dark night. She already had nightmares about that, or the same happening to Ana.

                She’d once suggested that her daughter find a posting away from London. That had been met by a truly disgusted look and a surprisingly thorough dressing-down. Ana had pointed out that she was an adult now- true, at forty years old only a very young adult even for a half-Tau’ka, but more than old enough by human standards to be making her own decisions. Daria, after all, had spent years flitting into and out of war zones and other troubled situations, and she no longer had any right to demand her daughter not choose to make a similar decision about where she was going to serve and how. She was going to serve where she was needed, and for now, she was needed in London.

                Daria had cried at that, both at the strength of Ana’s convictions to help others, and out of worry.

                Now she considered Peggy, sitting across the table from her, the empty bowls and plates of their luncheon stacked neatly to be cleared away by the wait staff. It had been soup today, mostly vegetables and beans with a little bacon, and slices of the tasteless, slightly greyish war bread that was about all that was available within London or outside of it. “The SSR? That’s where Erskine got sent.”

                Peggy nodded. “It is. I’m to be working with him, actually. He’s very nearly ready to test out what he’s been working on.”

                _That_ drew Daria’s interest. “What is he working on, anyway?” she asked. “No one ever told me. It had to be something important, to draw Hitler’s eye like it did. From the sounds of it, you had half the German army on your tail trying to get across the border. We were damned lucky that only that one group found us.”

                Her companion glanced discretely about. She’d mastered the art of barely turning her head to do so, and disguising those movements with other casual gestures like a stretch or a completely natural shift of weight or even tossing her dark curls back over her shoulders. Only when she had satisfied herself that no one was close enough to hear them talking did she lean in and speak in a low voice. She didn’t whisper, because whispers would garner more notice than a simply quiet conversation.

                “He’s been working on a serum,” she said. “One that will increase the physical and mental abilities of a subject to a truly incredible degree. Strength, agility, ability to recover after injury, everything, a lot like you, actually. They’re calling it Project Rebirth now, and according to Erskine, it’s what created Johann Schmidt.”

                Daria froze, taking all that information in. Peggy was one of the few people outside of a handful of commanders, the League, and MI13 who really knew all she could do.  Now she was describing work that sounded a disturbingly great deal like an attempt to recreate the Tau’ka.

                And the project had already succeeded once. She’d been hearing about Johann Schmidt for years. There were whispers that the leader of HYDRA had become even more obsessed with Teutonic myths, searching for some unknown artifact of great power that could only be accessed by a being greater than, superior to, ordinary humans.

                Daria found herself bristling with fury at that. Curse it all, she had already stopped one madman from selling the secrets in her blood to governments who would stop at nothing to create an army of knock-off Tau’ka, and here was Erskine, who had not only gone poking into that same field of research but had already succeeded in creating one! Schmidt, according to all of the bits and pieces of intelligence she’d managed to accumulate over the years, was mad, utterly driven, and just as utterly ruthless.

                _We’re only lucky that Hitler still has him on a fairly short leash. If he ever took to the field in any real manner…_

                “Are they _mad?_ ” she hissed, careful to keep her voice low. “They want to create _more_ Schmidts?”

                “Not Schmidt’s,” Peggy corrected. “Erskine said that the formula he had taken wasn’t ready, and neither was Schmidt himself.”

                “What the _hell_ does that mean?”

                 Her friend eyed her closely, silently warning her to keep a grip on her temper. “He said that the formula doesn’t just enhance physical traits, it enhances mental and personality traits as well. ‘Good becomes great, and bad becomes worse,’ was the phrase he used. Schmidt was already cruel and ambitious, and the serum only enhanced that.”

                Daria was put bitterly in mind of Henry’s elixir, and how it freed and magnified a malignant portion of his psyche into something far worse. Edward Hyde had been extremely dangerous, for the delight he took in causing chaos and destruction and his very limited ability to care about anyone but himself. It hadn’t been until Hyde had helped save the sinking _Nautilus_ that he’d been persuaded to channel those aggressive impulses into something a little more productive.

                It had been a very difficult and ongoing process, and a battle that Henry had dealt with every day of his life until he died.

                “And the Allied governments want to take that and, I presume, make an army of super soldiers to fight the war for them.”

                “More or less,” Peggy agreed. “But Erskine’s keeping a tight leash on them, at least for now. He’s been looking for an appropriate test subject for several months now, someone with personality traits that _ought_ to be magnified.”

                “So he’s looking for a saint to turn into a soldier. Charming.” Daria downed what was left of her tea and set the cup down hard enough to chip the bottom rim, earning her a raised eyebrow from Peggy. “What’s to guarantee Erskine will _stay_ in charge? Once he has a successful proof-of-concept test subject to trot out for their inspection, the Allied governments will be clamoring for supersoldiers of their own, and you can damn well be sure they won’t be half as concerned as Erskine about getting actually _good_ people for the job. I’ve seen this kind of thing before with technology, Peg. Once it’s been done, they’re going to want to get supersoldiers in training as fast as possible, and about ten minutes after those soldiers take to the field on _our_ side, you can bet Hitler’s going to scramble to get some of his own. And he- or Schmidt, if he gets involved, aren’t going to give a damn about making anything but ruthless killers, predators that won’t stop until they’ve slaughtered everything in their path. This will be as bad as those chemists on both sides of the Great War racing to come up with more and more deadly poisons to fling at enemy troops.”

                “He won’t let them remove him from the project,” Peggy said, though she did look a bit troubled at Daria’s words. “That was part of his arrangement when he agreed to bring his research over to our side, that he would have complete control over who actually received the final serum. He was very insistent upon that point.”

                “Governments change their minds. Once they got what they want, there’s not a whole lot to stop them from just making off with his research and putting it into mass production.”

                “My, aren’t we the cynic.”

                “You didn’t have to deal with the idiots in the War Department last time.”

                Peggy made a rather unladylike noise. “Erskine knows that. He’s taken steps to prevent that very thing from happening. None of his notes are actually complete- he’s kept back some very key parts of the formula specifically to keep the higher-ups from just forcing him out after he’s given them a success. But what he’s doing is important, Dar. You’ve seen the reports. You’ve been out on the front, same as I have. Right now we’re at a stalemate, and that will only last until HYDRA or some other research team starts delivering new weapons to the Axis soldiers. We need something that will give us enough of an advantage we can force an end to this war.”

                Daria felt a little shiver run down her spine at those words. True, Peggy had a point. They desperately needed some kind of critical tactical advantage to force the Axis powers to sue for peace before every man west of the Ural Moutains lay dead on some muddy, blood-soaked battlefield, but Peggy’s words had the feeling of a very dire prediction about them.

                “Alright. I see where you’re coming from,” she said at last.

                “I’m very glad you do,” Peggy replied, a little tartly. “Dr. Erskine’s work could be the difference between winning and finding nothing left of Europe and England but a bombed-out wasteland soaked in blood. Anything that brings the war to a close sooner rather than later should at least be considered, and I believe Dr. Erskine knows what he is doing.”

                Her hands were still tight on the teacup, and she heard the faint creaking sound of porcelain nearing its breaking point. Daria took a deep breath and loosened her hold on the inoffensive cup. “What I want to know is how he stumbled onto a line of research that would give him even a partial ‘success’ like Schmidt,” she said. Human science, she had thought, wasn’t quite that far along. At least, not in the field of genetics. It had taken extraordinarily sophisticated gene splicing techniques and technology to create the Tau’ka thousands of years ago, that much was a matter of her people’s known history.

                “From what he told me, he had a head start.” The brunette agent  neatly folded her napkin, running her fingers along the folds to sharpen the creases. “He organized an expedition to Mongolia about ten years ago. They found a case in the Amur River that contained several scientific samples and examples of engineering blueprints.”

                The teacup shattered in Daria’s hands. She stared at Peggy, for a moment headless of the china shards buried in her skin as well as the blood that welled up from the cuts.

                The case. Erskine had found Moriarty’s case of samples. The samples he had _stolen_ from her, from her packmates, from her husband.

                He had used what he’d found in that case to create supersoldiers.

                “Is he _mad_?” she demanded, her voice rising sharply. Several people turned to look at her, and she heard exclamations as someone noticed her bleeding hands. A waitress hurried over with clean cloths, babbling a little as she tried to help. Biting back a snarl of irritation, she waved the poor girl off and picked out the shards of broken porcelain from her skin, then pressed the cloths against the oozing cuts. She held her tongue, though, rather than continue speaking.

                Eventually the pub’s other patrons returned to their own meals and conversations, and left Daria and Peggy to their own. “Is he mad?” she repeated in a low hiss.

                “Mad enough to go looking for the case himself,” Peggy said. “He told me that most of the samples in it were ruined beyond any use, and the blueprints had been mostly obliterated by water, what little was left of them. But there was a vial of blood that had remained intact.”

                “And that’s even worse!” She had thought that they had won, that they had defeated Professor Moriarty and had prevented him from putting the secrets of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen into the hands of those who would weaponized them without a second thought.  Now, forty years later, that was exactly what was happening under her nose. Why the _hell_ had she never gone back to make sure those samples had been destroyed? “Did he have any idea what was actually in that case? Moriarty had a sample of a _vampire’s blood_ in there, Peggy! He could have been working with that blood sample instead of mine!”

                She had thought she’d felt violated when she’d learned that Moriarty’s agent, Dorian Gray, had betrayed them all and stolen their secrets for his employer, who had so successfully tricked them all.

                Her eyes flashed in the lamplight, grey-green and jewel-like, glittering with flecks of gold and blue and violet. Tau’ka eyes. _Does Johann Schmidt have eyes like mine now?_  “Bloody hell, Peggy, if he had- do you have any notion of how vampires reproduce? They infect a human victim with their own blood! How would he have been able to tell he hadn’t accidentally created a vampire serum before whoever he tested it on started hunting for people to feed on and turn?”

                “I’m sure he wouldn’t have jumped straight into human tests,” Peggy pointed out. “He isn’t Dr. Jekyll.”

                Daria glowered at her, though- alright. She had a point. Her husband had gotten himself into a great deal of trouble by testing his elixir on himself, after all. It was ultimately why they’d even met. Still. He hadn’t been experimenting with something _infectious._ “Henry had his flaws, and a certain scientific arrogance was one before he got it brutally knocked out of him,” she retorted. “He-“

                “Dr. Erskine took a risk for science by experimenting with the blood sample he discovered, but he was careful. And he was already well on the way to the right track before he ever left Germany.”

                “If you can call the _Red Skull_ a success.”

                Peggy glared at her. “You know what I mean, Daria. And he’s finished now. All he has left to do is find a test subject with the necessary character traits. He doesn’t want to create a monster. He wants to create a hero.” She leaned in, eyes a little hard. “He wants to create someone like _you_.”

                “Me?”

                “Yes, you. You were among the people who rescued him and all of those other children. He told me what it was like in Mongolia. He told me how you and the others came and dealt with the guards, then made sure they all got out of the fortress before it was destroyed. And you in particular, you personally helped the little ones out so they wouldn’t fall behind, you stopped any other guards from hurting them. He told me how brave you were, how dedicated you were to making sure no one was left behind.”

                To her surprise, Daria found herself flushing. “I only did what any decent person would have done,” she pointed out. “And I was hardly the only one getting the prisoners out. Edward was there clearing things out in front, and Captain Nemo, and _he_ had about a dozen of his crew along to help. Besides, there was no way I could let a child get left behind in there.” No chance in any kind of Hell, honestly. She, like the rest of her kind, absolutely adored children and had an especially protective streak regarding them.

                “Exactly.” Peggy nodded crisply. “You have a temper, Daria, especially when you think some injustice has been done, and you can be extremely _pragmatic_ , but you are, when all is said and done, a good person. You’re brave and loyal, and you don’t like people who hurt others. And you’ll do what needs doing to stop them. Weren’t you listening to yourself a moment ago? You were just as angry at the idea that the kind of power you possess would go to people who would not use it responsibly as you were about anything else. Dr. Erskine wants to make more people like _you_ , to serve as protectors for other people. You use your abilities to be a shield against evil, Daria. That’s all Dr. Erskine wants.”

                Daria fell quiet at those words. Frankly, that was an angle she hadn’t considered. Well, as Peggy had pointed out, she did have a temper, and that could cloud her thinking and make her react in less than ideal ways. But… she was right, in that half of her anger had been stemming from the fear that the gifts she used to protect her adopted homeworld would wind up in the hands of those who would abuse them. The other half, of course, had been a sharp resurgence of that old feeling of being violated, of having something so fundamentally _hers_ being stolen and used for another’s purposes. Again.

                At least she wasn’t the kind of Tau’ka who was so convinced of her race’s superiority that she was angered at these ‘uppity mere humans and their arrogant thinking they could recreate something so grand and remarkable as a Tau’ka’. There were plenty of her people who thought like that. Her elder brothers, for example, were two such.

                _I’m glad they’ve been pretty much off the radar for the last twenty years,_ she thought. _If they knew what Erskine was doing with Tau’ka blood- purebred Tau’ka blood, no less, they might get it into their heads to raze the planet or something._

                It had been her brothers who had allied with Moriarty in the first place in his scheme to stir up a world war. Unlike the criminal mastermind, however, they weren’t seeking profit. They wanted a world war for the sheer destruction and chaos it would cause, for they wanted to wipe out the supposedly lesser race.

                She’d come to the conclusion about fifty or sixty years ago that her twin brothers were absolutely raving mad.

                “I’m hardly a sterling example of humanity-“ she began.

                “Well, for one thing, you aren’t even human,” Peggy cut in. “But you _are_ a good person. You care about others, you’re willing to stand up against injustices, you put yourself on the line to protect people who can’t protect themselves, you’re brave… You have a lot of damn good qualities.”

                “I could say just the same about you.”

                Her friend smiled crookedly. “You could,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’m not the one with superhuman abilities, darling. I just fall back on people underestimating me and not expecting it when I hit them.”

                Daria, who had sparred with Peggy a few times for training and had been on the receiving end of more than a few of her surprisingly devastating punches, laughed. “Perhaps you ought to volunteer to be Dr. Erskine’s test subject, then, and come with me to escort Hitler and the Red Skull to the afterlife of your choice.”

                For a moment, Peggy actually paused and looked as if she were seriously considering the idea. “Well,” she said at last. “It’s certainly something to keep in mind.”

                “I think I can hear Nazis shaking in their boots at the very notion from here,” Daria laughed.

                “As well they should be.” Her friend smirked, looking quite satisfied with herself. “I dare say you and I could wrap things up quite neatly all by ourselves.”

                She checked the cuts in her hand and nodded in satisfaction. They had stopped bleeding, and they would heal within a couple of days. Tau’ka, even part-bloods, healed very quickly, and they were immune to most diseases.

                If Erskine’s supersoldier serum was based on her blood, that effectively made Schmidt- and whoever Erskine chose to test the reworked formula on- part Tau’ka. That gave her a better idea of how to judge their abilities.

                The one real uncertainty here would be trying to peg what their particular powers were. All Tau’ka boasted incredible speed and strength and healing abilities, along with a much faster metabolism and improved immune system than their human ancestors, but each had two or three _powers_. Mindspeech was the most common, appearing in perhaps two-thirds of the population with the rest having either true telepathy or empathy. Their creators had all but hard-wired those abilities into each of their creations, making sure those powers would always breed true in order to facilitate smooth, reliable, and unjammable communications between their engineered warriors.

                The other powers a Tau’ka could have were far more varied. Daria herself had a touch of telekinesis, enough to, say, pick a lock or lift a latch or pen, not much more than that. Her strongest power, however, was shapeshifting, which was a rather rare ability even among her kind. Few among her people could match the sheer variety of shapes she could take- most could only take a handful, and even those were generally limited to those with the general body plan of ‘vertebrate with four limbs’. Something in the body just seemed to resent trying to create or subtract limbs. Daria was one of the few who could take on the shape of a four-legged, winged gryphon with ease.

                There had been no rumors that the Red Skull had any shapeshifting ability, but who would actually know if he didn’t demonstrate it? Shapeshifting just didn’t seem in line with any of Schmidt’s known obsessions regarding so-called ‘superior man’.

                But of course, there wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of other powers he could develop. One of the communications gifts- Mindspeech, telepathy, or empathy- seemed a given. Since he had been changed with a serum based upon a Tau’ka but was not actually a true Tau’ka himself, she doubted he would show more than two powers at most. Those Tau’ka with recent human ancestry rarely showed more than two.

                She wanted to be out there spying on the man himself. There was simply no way to predict what he had developed without much better intelligence gathered by someone who knew what she was looking for. 

                “I would like to meet whoever Erskine does choose,” she said at last. “Help train him, if I can. He’ll wind up being somewhere between a normal person and someone like me, and I’d be able to help him get a handle on things better than almost anyone else.”

                Peggy nodded. “I think that would be a good idea, if you can be spared from the front that long. You won’t be spending much more time here in London, will you?”

                “Sadly no. I was given a week off after my last assignment and I have to head back out in a couple of days.” With the bleeding now stopped, she carefully picked up the bits of broken china, wiped them clean, and stacked them in one of the bowls they had used earlier. The cloth she stuffed into a pocket, to burn later. No one else was going to get their hands on her blood. “I will get a chance to see Ana tomorrow, which will be lovely.”

                “How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” Peggy had met her daughter several times and knew her well enough that she would usually ask Daria about her when they saw one another. For her part, the prickly Ana very much liked Peggy and her no-nonsense attitude.

                “Six months. They’re keeping her quite busy at her lab, and she’s doing actual research.”

                Peggy smiled proudly. “That’s good. They’re taking her seriously, then. Not, I suppose, that she would permit anything less. She’s even more blunt than we are. Tell her hello from me?”

                “Of course. She’ll probably want to see you too, so try and stop by before you ship off to the States.” She rose and stretched a little. “I should be going, love.”

                Her friend also got to her feet, moving around the table to embrace her.  “Stay safe,” she told her.  “I’ll let you know as soon as Dr. Erskine finds someone.  Surely this Colonel Philips will see the wisdom in having you come and assist and will make sure the right strings get pulled. From what I’ve heard of the man, he’s quite happy to wrestle what he needs from the politicians in order to get his work done. We’ll see if he’s willing to do the same with MI13.”

                Hugging her friend tightly, Daria grinned. “Alright, I want to see that if it happens,” she said. “My superiors are generally pretty sensible, but I do take a little joy in seeing them outmaneuvered once in a while.”

                “You’re terrible.” Peggy smiled wryly. She kissed Daria on the cheek, a gesture the other woman returned before she drew back. “I’ll write soon.”

                “I will too, don’t you worry.” With a fond nod, Daria headed out onto the street.

                This part of London, a few streets up from where the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen maintained its main headquarters and base of operations, had so far avoided the worst of the German bombings.  At first glance, things almost seemed normal.

                Almost. Then one took a closer look, and saw that things weren’t so normal at all.

                Some things were obvious.  Newspapers carried headlines about the progress- or lack thereof- of the war.  There were almost no fruit sellers in sight, because between rationing and attacks on food shipments coming into the country meant there was very little in the way of imported fruit to be had. Bananas had entirely disappeared- Daria hadn’t seen one in years now, because there was simply no safe way to bring them in. And oranges- well.  Sometimes those came in, but they were strictly reserved for children or invalids, as were quite a few other foodstuffs.  She could see empty spaces on shelves through the windows of the greengrocer’s across the street from where she stood. Not many, since the government-organized rationing ensured that shops would always have certain goods, and enough of them for the people who had registered their ration books there, but enough to be noticeable.  Every patch of available ground not covered by paving stones had been thriftily turned over for making tiny garden plots, where vegetables were even now growing and starting to ripen as they moved into summer.  There was a smell of dust in the air, a faint scent of burnt wood and something acrid and sharp that burned a little at the back of her throat.

                Some things were a little less obvious. There were still people on the streets going about their daily lives. It took a second, harder look to realize what was wrong there. The majority of those people, dressed mainly in drab colors like khaki and grey and various shades of brown because dyes were so difficult to be had these days, were _women_. A few old men went about their business, those old enough to avoid conscription, and a handful of men who couldn’t be sent overseas or were engaged with important tasks on the home front.  Very few children. Most of those had been sent by their parents to live with relatives in the country, or sent them off to other people who lived farther away from the city who were willing to open their homes to them, in order to ensure their safety.  Those that remained were mostly children of poorer families, or who otherwise didn’t have the means to send their offspring away.

                But mostly, the people Daria saw on the street were women. As more and more men were called up for the war effort, more and more women stepped into those jobs they left behind. She had seen this before too. She’d even visited a few villages during the Great War who had been entirely bereft of males between the ages of about fifteen and fifty. It hurt her heart to see those patterns repeating.

                What was worse was knowing that things were even more horrific elsewhere.  England, for all it was besieged, for all that German U-boats preyed on the ships that were her lifeblood, for all that the German Luftwaffe took any opportunity to fly over the Channel and rain fire upon her from the sky, was _not_ the front. The pitched battles weren’t being fought on England’s ground. The real horrors- the tanks, the machine guns, the fields of mud criss-crossed by dank, smoking ruins of towns and villages and barbed wire and dotted with land mines, were in Europe, not England.

                Daria paused in the street for a moment, as those images rose in her mind, unbidden. She’d been there, many times. She remembered what it was like, remembered taking shelter in one of those bombed-out towns that took the place of the first war’s trenches, where muddy water might come above your ankles, where the earth was literally red in places from spilled blood. Remembered the way artillery whistled overhead and how the men around her would press themselves as low as they could and pray that this time, this shell wouldn’t strike near you. Remembered the earsplitting sound of those shells going off, and how they sprayed mud and debris, bits of metal and wood from the beams the men used to shore up the crumbling sides of their trenches, how that concussive force would tear through anything, including those same men, like gory tissue paper.

                And the _stink_. Rank mud, aged blood, rotting and burned wood, the smell of men who had been working hard, working at varying levels of pants-pissing terror, with little opportunity to bathe.  The smell of rat urine, because there were rats _everywhere_ unless a recent shelling had killed or frightened them off. Diesel and motor oils for the trucks and tanks and the choking fumes they gave off.  Rotting flesh, because when a shell came down on a bunker or camp there weren’t always pieces big enough to take away or bury, much less send home for a funeral.

                Not, thankfully, the stink of mustard gas that had been one of the primary hallmarks of the Great War. She knew, she _knew_ because she had seen them with her own eyes, that _both_ sides of this horrible, awful, bloody war had been stockpiling poison gases. She had _seen_ a German stockpile on a reconnaissance mission, and she had learned with horror that Winston Churchill had actually once proposed using gas on German towns.

                The one good thing that seemed to have come out of the Great War was that everyone- everyone below that strata of government types who were more concerned about numbers and overarching tactics than the true horrors of being out there in the middle of those tactics- had unanimously agreed that _no, these gas weapons are too horrible and we do not want to use them or have them be used on us._ Thankfully, this time the governments were listening. No one wanted the enemy to turn poison gases on them, so neither side had risked using them.

                What was actually going on was bad enough.

                Daria braced herself on a lamp post, fighting past nausea and memories, trying to keep them from overwhelming her.  Slowly, she forced herself to breathe, reminding herself she was here in London and safe for the moment, not in a bunker or trench somewhere out in the middle of that living hell. Slowly her mind cleared, and she was able to push the memories back, where they were just memories and not something she was experiencing here and now.

                Shellshock, it was called among the men.  The Tau’ka had another word for it, that meant ‘trauma that returns’.  Their medics and healers were used to dealing with it, though Tau’ka as a breed seemed curiously resistant to it compared to humans. It was something in the way their brains were wired, that didn’t normally permit memories to be encoded with such overwhelming emotional associations of fear or pain.

                _A race of supersoldiers is fair useless if half of them are mentally crippled from the wartime trauma you force them into._

                Sometimes, though, those memories were stored with whatever neurological glitches made them come back without warning and with overwhelming force.  Their healers knew that, and part of every Tau’ka agent’s training was methods for dealing with those memories- ways to keep them at bay, ways to push them back when they rose up, ways of studying and examining them and facing those remembered horrors until the worst of the sharp edges were worn off and no longer clawed at the mind with such ferocity. Daria had done her best to help those around her by teaching them those methods as well as she could, but she was no healer. She wasn’t trained to help others with minds scarred by trauma, and humans just weren’t quite wired the same as her kind. And that wasn’t even getting into the _stigma_ around all of it, how people would look at some poor soul suffering from shellshock and whisper cruel things like _coward_ and _malingerer._

                One would think that after decades of dealing with such as significant part of the population suffering from shellshock, people would get it into their heads that those who suffered from it were _wounded_ , as surely as any veteran who had lost a limb to a mine or could barely breathe through gas-burned lungs.

                _Oh right. I expected humans to actually learn things._

                No, that was unfair.  There was gradual change, but it was quite slow. Humans had a remarkable ability to delude themselves and keep unpleasant notions at a distance, but they did learn eventually. She could fairly point out that there were plenty of other races who were also quite slow on the uptake, and her own was no exception.

                It was just frustrating.  The Great War had been five years of a logistical nightmare, of blood spilled out needlessly onto European fields because those in charge refused to change tactics, preferring to blame catastrophic failures on the cowardice of those men bleeding into the dirt in pointless charge after pointless charge. It had been ugly and brutal and _pointless_ , because not twenty years later here they were again, fighting the same people all over again.  Here _she_ was, effectively fighting the same war all over again with no end anywhere in sight.

                Pointless.

                She pushed away from the lamp post, her breathing calmer and her emotions mostly under control. She had a few days yet before she had to go back to work, and she had things she wanted to do while she still could.

                _We just keep soldiering on. That’s all any of us can actually do at this point._


	4. A Letter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this? Another chapter? Wow.

 

_July, 1943_

                _My dear Daria,_

_I really wish I had better news than this. Well, it’s mixed news, I suppose. I told you in my last letter that Dr. Erskine had finally found a test subject for the serum. He’s a young man from Brooklyn by the name of Steve Rogers, and just looking at him you would think there was no way even science could make him fit for battle. I could probably pick him up with one hand if I cared to try. But it wasn’t the physical Dr. Erskine was looking for, remember. The man has a spark about him- he might be small and weak, but he refused to let that stop him from standing up to bullies. I rode with him to the SSR facility and he kept pointing out where he got beat up. When I asked him if he had something against running away, he just said that he couldn’t let people just walk all over him, that he had to push back. And I get the sense that more than a few of those fights were because someone had been picking on someone helpless to fight back, not on him in particular. He impressed Colonel Phillips in training too, which takes some doing for a ninety-pound asthmatic. At one point Phillips threw a dummy grenade into the middle of his squad and he jumped onto it himself while everyone else ran for cover. I think that was about the point where Phillips decided Erskine might have made the right choice. I know it was when I did._

_Unfortunately I don’t think Steve is really going to get a chance to prove himself. A HYDRA assassin managed to sneak into the facility and shot Dr. Erskine after Steve was given the serum. He didn’t make it out with the last vial of it, thank God, but with the precautions Erskine was taking about his notes, there’s currently no way to recreate it. Project Rebirth has been shelved, possibly for good. I think in a way you will be relieved about that. You were very upset about the concept of the entire project, and with good reason._

_Steve, though… I wish you could meet him, Daria. He’s a lot like you, only perhaps more determined because he’s spent his entire life trying to prove himself to people who overlook him for reasons he couldn’t help._

_Since he was the only thing to come out of the project, Colonel Phillips wanted him sent off to a lab for study in the hopes they could re-create what Dr. Erskine did. Funnily enough, Steve wanted no part of that. Well, a man who attempted to enlist in the Army five times, lying on his forms each time, would hardly be content to stay locked in a laboratory to be poked and prodded by scientists with needles. He took an offer with Senator Brandt- you remember me telling you about him, that rather slimy fellow on the committee overseeing Project Rebirth, the one with the atrocious hair- to become the star of a propaganda  tour. You know the sort I’m sure, stars and spangled bunting and dancing girls and ‘buy war bonds to buy bullets’ and brass bands and rousing speeches of patriotism and doing your Duty for King and God and Country- well, president in their case, I suppose. Still. The Americans really have a knack for glorifying patriotic duty, it’s rather amusing to watch.  I expect the posters for the tour will start coming out soon. I have no intention of seeing it. The war is a bit more of an abstract for them. Not that they don’t know it’s going on, or think it isn’t real, and they aren’t exactly sitting by with their heads in the sand. They are seeing hardships. There’s rationing here too, and the same kinds of pushes for victory gardens, and there are so many families who are broken up because sons and husbands are going overseas and may or may not come back. But that’s the problem, it’s overseas for them. It’s not their homes being bombarded every week, every day. It’s at a remove for them. They push the ideas of patriotism and heroism and doing your duty, and they’re doing an incredible job of it. They’re pouring out supplies and food and soldiers with hardly a thought of doing otherwise. But they aren’t seeing the horrors first-hand like we are, unless they’re working at a hospital or  actually deployed over here or have lost someone or had someone come home a cripple. It’s so very surreal to watch them. They know what’s going on, more or less, but the horrors haven’t really sunk in quite like they have for England. I suppose there’s something to be said for being an ocean away from the battlefield._

_Do you remember what it was like in the first World War? I wasn’t born yet, but I remember my mother telling me that when it first broke out, there was this idea that we’d send our Tommys out and it would be a swift victory. ‘Home by Christmas’, was the phrase they used, and our boys would be coming back covered in glory. It seems like that’s sort of what their thinking is…_

_They’re reassigning us, the whole SSR. We’re going from focusing on trying to recruit and create supersoldiers to hunting HYDRA directly, which means we’re coming back. By the time you get this, I expect I’ll be in our new base of operations, wherever that may be._

_Don’t get overeager. I know you’re going to want in on a dedicated HYDRA hunt. I’ll make a few requests and see if I can’t get you transferred to our unit. Though I don’t think I’ll mention your particular connection to the project- I doubt you want to take Steve’s place in Alamagordo. That’s in New Mexico. I suspect the weather is quite horrible this time of year. Isn’t it supposed to be mostly desert? Sounds positively wretched._

_With any luck I’ll be seeing you soon. Don’t worry, dear. I won’t win the war until you get here. Say hello to Ana for me._

_All my love,_

_Peggy_

  

                Daria smiled softly as she finished Peggy’s letter.  Trust her to consider a desert a ‘positively wretched’ clime. She was, after all, English born and bred. They seemed to thrive in the cold and the damp.  She herself preferred hot and dry climes. Her homeworld, Verris, was mostly of that sort of persuasion, and she’d grown up happily baking in hot sun.

                But if Alamagordo was home to a lab where the SSR had wanted to send the sole subject of Project Rebirth, then Daria would be more than happy to give the place a wide berth. She had no desire to find herself locked in a science lab for the rest of the war.

                Glancing up, she noted how dark it was getting outside. She set Peggy’s letter aside and grabbed the blackout frame from where it leaned against the wall, hooking it in place over the window to block any sign of light from it. This had been standard procedure for people all over the Isles for several years now, and she almost no longer even thought about it, it was just part of the evening routine.

                The letter had been encoded in a fairly simple fashion. Peggy had used something like a blunt-tipped needle to write it, leaving her words as mere impressions in the paper, then had written a second, decoy letter chattering about mostly inconsequential things over the real content. The governments on both sides of the water were encouraging their populaces to be thrifty enough that no censoring agent would look twice at a piece of paper that had a few impressions on it from something written on a page atop it, or at something that had clearly been erased so the paper could be re-used. Seeing only a letter that talked about things like schoolhood reminisces, the agents would let it pass through without blocking out details or redacting information. She and Peggy had been exchanging letters like this for years now; in fact, it was Daria who had taught Peggy this particular trick to add to her arsenal of codes and methods for passing on hidden messages. It let them talk more openly than they would otherwise have been able to manage.

                What Peggy had passed onto her was quite interesting. So. The SSR was chasing HYDRA. Peggy was completely right in assuming Daria would want in on that. Her letter was dated just over a week ago, so chances were good she was already at her new base of operations.

                _Excellent. I’ll be hearing from her soon if she managed to pull the right strings. Hmm. I wonder- if Phillips has Peggy working for him, will he accept another openly female intelligence agent? That could be lovely, if I could work on a base where I didn’t have to be constantly concerned one of the boys will catch me slipping. And if there are two women, that means Peggy will get a little more access to things. She would like that. I am truly sorry to hear about Erskine, though. He didn’t deserve that kind of fate…_

                She’d smiled to see how Peggy had signed the letter. ‘All my love’- that delighted her. Peggy’s feelings for her had not faded in the months since they’d last seen each other. It would be lovely if she could get assigned to the same base and see her…

                “Mother?” A young woman with very red hair poked her head into the little room where Daria had been curled up by the window. Her features were almost a perfect halfway point between those of her parents. Her eyes were distinctively Tau’ka, large and slightly slanted, with a curiously faceted sort of appearance to the irises, but were pale sapphire blue rather than the iridescent green-grey of labradorite like her mother’s. Daria’s high cheekbones were paired with Henry Jekyll’s long, narrow face and high brow.  She stood almost a full two inches taller than her mother, but while she was broad-shouldered, she wasn’t as stocky as Daria was. Her hands were marked by pepperings of chemical burns, while her mother’s hands were marked with knife scars instead, and her hair was somewhere between Daria’s auburn and Henry’s bright copper.  “There you are. Come on, dinner’s going to get cold if you don’t come eat.”

                Daria set the letter aside. “I’m coming, dear,” she told daughter. Now that she was paying attention, she could smell dinner.  Beans again, as usual. Beans weren’t rationed like so many other things were, so they appeared in some form or fashion at most meals.  At least their cook was a very clever one, who made excellent use of the very limited ingredients she could get her hands on. She did very well by her charges, the members of the League and her fellow servants.

                She followed Ana down to the kitchen to join the others for dinner, her mind eagerly turning over what Peggy had written.  She hoped her friend would be able to arrange for Daria to join her. It would be so nice to have a fixed assignment, rather than bouncing between camps and commanders to suit the needs of the moment…


	5. The Hunt is On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to start kicking things off! I wanted to get this out a little sooner since the last one didn't give you guys a whole lot. 
> 
> I never originally intended for this chapter to be so long, it just insisted that it needed to be.
> 
> Also, I speak like five words of German, tops. All German in this fic is provided courtesy of Google Translate. If any of you speak German yourselves and have a better way of phrasing any of the German dialog in this fic, please let me know so I can fix it!

_November 1943_

_Italy_

 

Daria tossed her duffel onto the cot that took up the majority of the space in the tiny tent she’d been allotted in the American Army camp the SSR had attached itself to.  It had taken a little doing to persuade Colonel Phillips to permit her to have her own tent. He’d initially insisted that she share a tent with Peggy, seeing as they were both women. Daria had refused.

Not because she didn’t _want_ to share a tent with Peggy. Quite the opposite, in fact. She would have _very_ much liked to have shared a tent with her lovely comrade-in-arms-and-spy-work.  Northern Italy was turning to be almost as damp and cold as England this time of year, and she and Peggy were not at _all_ against the notion of sharing a cot. Oh no. Rather, they’d been rather enthusiastic during those rare opportunities to do just that. And beds were _so_ much warmer with company. Especially company that kissed as well as Peggy did.

But she was still publicly maintaining the fiction that she was Darian Noclaf, the _male_ operative from a rather secretive branch of British Intelligence. Darian Noclaf would never be permitted to share a living space with a woman.  Moreover, Peggy wouldn’t permit Darian Noclaf to share a living space with _her_. It just simply wasn’t done.  Instead, Peggy was now sharing a tent with a female nurse who had been shipped in at the same time Daria was.

The camp as a whole was fairly quiet at the moment. Most of the company operating out of this camp, the 107th, had deployed that morning well before dawn to go tangle with a HYDRA division operating just over the border and hadn’t yet returned.  They were supposed to return that afternoon.

They weren’t the only ones due to arrive. The Captain America show was supposed to be arriving sometime that night to set up for performances the next day, as part of a tour of camps near the front line meant to boost morale. Daria was actually rather intrigued in spite of herself; it would be her first opportunity to see Captain America himself, Erskine’s hand-chosen test subject Steve Rogers. By all accounts his show tour had been wildly successful. Daria couldn’t decide what she thought of the man and his decision to join the show, beyond admitting it was a much more palatable option than being locked in a laboratory for study.

She began unpacking those few things she wanted out of her duffel. When in the field, she never completely unpacked, so as to minimize what might be lost if a camp came under attack and she had to grab her bag and run. At the moment, all she wanted was her sword and the small sharpening kit.  She’d carried the blade since well before she’d ever been assigned to Earth. It was a fairly long, straight blade with a single cutting edge and a tip that flared slightly. She carried it on missions, preferring it to guns when possible, though she was grudgingly coming to realize it probably wouldn’t be useful for too many more years.

She still held on to it in spite of that. If she was going to kill someone, it seemed more fitting to do it personally, with her own hands- or claws, or teeth- rather than at a distance.  There was no denying the kill that way, no way not to acknowledge the life she took.  She was a warrior, there was no denying that. She’d long ago made peace with the idea that she _would_ kill, that she would spill the life blood of another being.  When given the chance, she would try to avoid killing if she could, but if someone were coming to hurt her or those under her protection, she would kill them first, as quickly and cleanly as possible.  But she didn’t like the disconnect of a gun. With a knife, a sword, her claws, she had to share that moment of death. She had to own up to it, and give the life she took the dignity of acknowledging what she had done.  It was just taking responsibility for the blood on her hands.

She owed that to the people she killed, rather than pretending she was somehow less responsible for their deaths.

Sitting cross-legged on her cot, she drew the blade and began honing it with a small stone from her kit, taking a few minutes to settle into the meditative rhythm of the process. The honing stone slid along the length of the blade with a low scraping sound, as familiar to her as her own breathing.

Peggy found her there a little while later, as rain began to patter down on the canvas roof of the tent. Daria looked up with a smile, which quickly faded as she took in the grim expression on the agent’s face.

“Peg?” she asked softly. “What’s wrong?”

The other woman moved the sharpening kit out of the way and sat beside her on the edge of the cot. “I was at the command tent with Colonel Phillips,” she said. “We just got word from the 107th. They’ve taken very heavy losses.”

Daria went still. She really didn’t like Peggy’s tone. “How bad, luv?”

“They’re on their way back,” she replied. “Those who are still alive and intact enough to walk, anyway. I expect the first ambulances will be back before they are. But there won’t be many in either group. HYDRA took whole swaths of them prisoner and made off with them. We think they have a base or a factory somewhere over there.”

She growled, low in her throat. It was an open secret that Allied soldiers taken prisoner by HYDRA didn’t last long. They would either be worked to death in their munitions factories or experimented upon by their scientists, a grim fate either way.

“Does Phillips have a plan to rescue them?” she demanded, eyes hard and glinting.

“Directly?” Peggy asked. “No. We don’t have the manpower right now to go stomping blindly around back behind the German lines. Not even for almost one hundred and fifty men.” There was a glitter of repressed anger in her own eyes. A hundred and fifty men, that was nearly three quarters of the company.  That was a hundred and fifty families who wouldn’t know for sure if their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, were dead or alive. That seemed unimaginably cruel.

“What if we weren’t blind?”

A small, tight smile curved Peggy’s scarlet lips. “What if, indeed,” she said. “I suggested to the colonel that we send you out there to find them. You can get in and out, find where HYDRA is holding those men, give us an idea of what we’re facing, and Phillips can use that intel to plan a rescue. It’s heavily fortified out there, but that’s all we know for sure. We need to know a lot more before we even consider moving.”

 “I can at least give you coordinates, if nothing else,” she agreed. “And count heads, figure out roughly how many people we need to rescue. Yes. I’ll do it.”

“Very good. Colonel Phillips is in the command tent-“

Daria didn’t wait for her to finish speaking before she was giving her a quick peck on the cheek and getting to her feet. “Then that’s where I’ll go.”

The rain had let up a little as they left to hike through the muddy ‘streets’ of the camp, reduced to a steady cold drizzle that managed to find every gap in their oiled coats to creep down their collars. Phillips leaned against the long table that had been set up in the open-fronted command tent, listening to the young officer manning the radio equipment.

“Our sentries just reported the first ambulances are coming in and just made it to the checkpoint,” he said, glancing up as Daria and Peggy ducked into the tent.

Phillips looked up as well. “Agents,” he said stiffly.

“Colonel.” Peggy replied as Daria nodded a greeting.

“Agent Carter tells me you can be of some help, Agent Noclaf.” He eyed her closely. “Is that true? Because if it isn’t I’m going to have to sign a lot more condolence letters than I really care to think about and nobody wants that.”

“I can, sir,” she said. “I can leave tonight. That many people, it shouldn’t be too hard to track them down, and I can move a lot faster than an armed squad and without as much notice as vehicles. I can find them, mark out where the site is, and give you an idea of stationary defenses and whatever forces might be stationed there. “

Though his face retained the same grim expression, with strain carved into each line, she saw something flicker in his eyes. Hope. Phillips might be gruff and intolerant of fluff and political games, but he was worried about the people under his command who were even now out there in the wilderness, being dragged further and further behind enemy lines.

“Then tell me what the hell you’re still doing standing here, Noclaf?” he demanded. “The sooner you get your ass out there and give me numbers the sooner I can plan a rescue operation.”

Peggy hid a smile at that, looking rather inordinately pleased with herself.  This didn’t escape the colonel’s notice.

“And you can stop smirking and get back to work, Agent Carter,” he said. “You’re not the one with the freaky powers I need right now. “

Her smile faded into the mask she usually reserved for men who were getting on her nerves. “Yes, Colonel.”  She tugged Daria’s arm as Phillips turned his attention back to the radio operator’s report, and the two women trotted back off through the rain.

The first ambulances were drawing up to the hospital tent as they passed. Daria paused a moment, watching medics swarm the vehicles to carry wounded soldiers out.

“This is going to be some audience for the USO,” she said sadly. “Barely a quarter of the company back alive, much less well enough to see the show.” She headed on towards her tent, sidestepping a sodden copy of the Captain America comic that had been circulating among the troops the past few months. The cover showed the titular Captain himself, dressed in a gaudy red-white-and-blue costume, punching Hitler in the face. Daria hadn’t actually read the comic herself yet, but she knew that winning the war wouldn’t be half as easy as the cover implied it would be.

Peggy helped her put together a kit for her mission. She would travel as light as she could. That meant rations and a canteen among her supplies, but no camping gear other than a blanket. She would stay in animal form for most of the scouting mission, relying on animal senses to help track her quarry and smaller animal size to keep hidden and find shelter. A wolf needed a lot less in the way of shelter than a person would, an owl even less. She wouldn’t go as a gryphon except by night, to avoid alerting the Germans to the presence of the ‘winged monster’ that had been known to occasionally appear and wreck absolute havoc on the Axis forces it came across. As a wolf, too, or an owl, or some other smaller predator, she could quite easily hunt and feed herself. She wouldn’t take the shape of anything that a local would consider trying to shoot for meat. Food was the first thing to fall into short supply when any occupying force moved in, and she had no doubt that HYDRA would strip the villages around wherever they had set up shop absolutely bare in very short order.

The most important part of her kit would be her radio and maps. Her plan was to track HYDRA to its lair, wherever that might be, then take to the air to survey the land from above and plot the base’s location on one of her maps. When she had the coordinates as best as she could calculate, she would radio that information back to Phillips. That way, if the very worst happened and she was discovered and taken prisoner or killed, Phillips would at least know where HYDRA was and take steps from there.

The hardest part would be restraining herself from trying to take action alone, then and there. She had seen what the Nazis and HYDRA did to prisoners, whether they were military prisoners or… otherwise.

 _I hope there aren’t any children there_ , she thought, feeling ill at the very thought. _If there are children in there, I won’t be able to just walk away and make them wait for Phillips to mount a rescue._

“Looks like that’s everything,” Peggy said, zipping up the larger of the two packs Daria would carry. She looked up at her. “You be careful,” she told her sternly. “I expect you to come back in one piece.”

“I always come back,” Daria pointed out.

“Not always in one piece.” She sighed, lips going tight. “I wish I was going in there with you so you’d have someone to watch your back. I hate this part, the waiting on someone else to bring back information before I can start doing anything productive.”

Daria pulled her close, kissing her softly. “You can do something productive,” she said. “You’ve started putting together a decent idea of how HYDRA operates. Maybe you can study the maps and try to narrow down where they’re hiding from here. I’ll be in contact for as long as I’m in range and keep you updated. You can have fun pretending to make deductions for Phillips without letting on to anyone else that I’m sending you information.”

Peggy laughed a little. “Trying to make me out to be a right Sherlock Holmes, are you?” she asked.

“The more in awe of you these boys are, the more likely they will listen when you need them to.”

“True.” She rested her head against Daria’s shoulder for a moment, just long enough for them to enjoy the chance to hold one another. Then she drew back. “Go. The quicker you get back, the more of those men will be alive when we can mount a rescue.”

“I’ll be careful, I promise.” Daria gave her a last smile, then shifted shape. An osprey wasn’t her usual choice of shape, but the fish-eating hawk _did_ have feathers that were mostly waterproof, which suited her needs in this weather. She just hoped no one who happened to spot her wondered what she was doing so far away from any large body of water.

Peggy wrapped a blanket around her arm as a makeshift hawking glove and offered her wrist for Daria to step onto. She did so, careful not to let her talons pierce through the rough cloth as Peggy carried her outside and gave her a toss to boost her into the air. A few awkward wingbeats to get herself righted properly, and she was off into the drizzly sky.

The landscape spread below her like the world’s most detailed map, tinged with the odd colors near red that only birds saw. Most of the trees had already shed their leaves for the season, but a few still hung on to the remains of October’s colorful mantle like a handful of dying embers. Some of her worries fell away with the earth below. It was so hard to hold on to fears when she was flying.

As the proverbial crow- or in this case, osprey- flew, it wasn’t all that far to the battlefield. They were at the very foothills of the Alps here, and the site chosen for the fight had been a broad, shallow-sloped valley dotted with trees. Now it was pockmarked by tank and artillery fire, and the dead lay everywhere in the mud. There were still people at work, mostly medics in American uniforms who were still sorting out who was wounded and could be saved, who was wounded and could not be saved, and who was already dead.

There were more HYDRA uniforms on the dead here than American ones. She thought that odd, until something else drew her attention. Peppering the American side of the battlefield were charred circles of grass and bare earth, with tendrils of that same charring radiating out from the center.  It looked almost like lightning had struck these places, but that couldn’t be possible. They had been getting a lot of rain, yes, but no lightning.

Daria circled the battlefield for a few more moments, then shifted again. No one would notice a raven on the site of a massive fight. Even now, a flock of them had descended upon the German side of the field to start picking at the dead. She glided down and hopped to a stop by one of the charred patches, cocking her head to inspect the site. Stepping onto the center of the spot proved it was still warm, even with icy rain still coming down.

 _Whatever did this must have generated a tremendous amount of heat,_ she thought, giving the center an experimental peck. Whatever it was, it wasn’t lightning. The soil had not fused in the center of the patch, as it would have if lightning had indeed struck the spot.

Most odd, though, was the scent that hung over the patch, just noticeable over the reek of blood and artillery smoke and the rest of the smells of a battlefield. Ravens had a fairly decent sense of smell, for birds at least, and she knew what the raven smelled, she would be able to in her own shape. The smell that hung over the patch of scorched ground was one part burned grass and stone, and one part something bitter and acrid. Not quite like ozone, but it did put her in mind of some high-energy power sources the Tau’ka used back home.

“Hey!” A medic ran up, anger overriding the weariness on his face and even the tear streaks on his cheeks. He waved at her, clearly trying to shoo her away from the bodies lying around the spot she’d been investigating. “Git on out of here! Go on, git! Damned birds, can’t you leave them in peace?”

She hastily scrambled back into the air before he could try stronger measures to scare away what he plainly thought was a raven come to desecrate the bodies of the fallen. Poor thing. He was quite young, and probably hadn’t seen many actions like this. Certainly he probably hadn’t seen many where so many were killed or captured.

Flying towards the far end of the valley where HYDRA had been lurking, it wasn’t terribly hard to figure out what direction they had gone.  Boots and tank treads had torn up the ground fairly badly, and they ran in both directions.  At a rough count, however, there were more prints heading away from the battlefield than towards it.

She studied the churned-up ground.  Might she be able to catch up to HYDRA before they even got to their base? It was possible, but that begged a further question: would it do any good if she did? She might have skills and abilities far beyond that of an ordinary human, but was she up to the task of liberating a hundred-odd men, many of whom were probably injured? How was she to get away with them all even if she did? Her task was to gather intelligence, not mount a rescue. She wasn’t equipped to pull off such a feat. Given her preferences,  if she were going to try it she would want several days’ time in which to follow the HYDRA group back to their base. With that kind of time, she could afford to be careful, to pick off individual sentries, perhaps smuggle knives or small arms to some of the prisoners, even attempt to poison the HYDRA soldiers. 

Daria didn’t think she had that much time.

She flew off into the woods a ways, following the trail the Germans and their prisoners had left for her. She didn’t go more than a mile before she found indisputable evidence that at least one of the Americans had fought.  The bodies of two men in American uniforms lay discarded on the side of the trail, slumped like broken dolls. They had been shot once each, right in the back of the head.

Here in the forest, Daria felt no qualms about landing and taking her own shape to inspect the bodies. Carefully, she turned them over so she could see their faces, noting that rigor mortis had already begun to stiffen their necks and arms and pooling blood had already set in place. A careful touch proved they were still a little bit warm despite the cold.

 _A couple of hours_ , she thought. _Three or four at the most. I’m no more than that far behind them_. _HYDRA wanted these men badly enough to make off with them as fast as they could move, but not so badly they didn’t bat an eye at slaughtering anyone who fought back or tried to run._

These two had most likely fought back. There were very fresh bruises on their hands and faces that looked as if they had been struck with rifle butts shortly before they had been killed, though she supposed they could have received the wounds when they’d been taken prisoner.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the two dead men. “I’ll make sure your families are told, and that as many of your friends make it home alive as possible.”

It was the most she could do as far as compassion went. She didn’t have the time to bury them, and could only hope their ghosts would be appeased by the gesture.

Before rising, she tugged at their dog tags until the chains popped free, then tucked the little metal tags into a pocket for safekeeping. She would deliver the tags of any other soldiers she found back to Colonel Phillips, so he could do what was necessary to notify their families.

Or- family. One of the tags had no name punched into the spot designated for next of kin.

“Alexander Smith,” she said softly, looking at the man with the blank spot on his tag. “I hope whatever you believed in life, you’re with your family now.”

That was all she could do for the two dead soldiers beyond mentally marking their positions and promising that if she got the chance, she would send someone to collect their bodies when she returned to camp.

A wolf was a lot better at covering rough ground than a person. Here under the trees, it was also more suited to following a trail than a raven or osprey. As a wolf, she moved at a swift lope that ate up the distance without wearing her out. HYDRA had left a few more dead prisoners along the side of their trail, but not as many as she might have expected. One of them had clearly simply collapsed from his injuries and had been left to die, rather than being executed. A short ways beyond him, another soldier _had_ been shot. He was facing the first man, leading Daria to wonder if he’d tried to come to his comrade’s aid and been shot for it. As she had with the first two bodies, she inspected these, estimated when they had died, collected their dog tags, and moved on.

Perhaps ten miles away from the battlefield, well behind enemy lines, she found a very large clearing absolutely covered in tire tracks. The footprints broke up here. Groups of them would lead to a cluster of tire tracks, then simply vanish. Here, behind their own lines, HYDRA had kept a number of trucks and transports waiting and brought the prisoners to the vehicles so they could be transported even more quickly.

They had been planning to take prisoners all along.

Daria-the-wolf growled softly at that realization. This wasn’t just an opportunity that HYDRA had snapped up when it had arisen. They’d come into the fight planning on capturing Allied soldiers, had planned on taking as many as possible, and had prepared to move dozens of men.

So why would they want so many soldiers?

 _Labor_ , she thought, loping along to follow the tire tracks. _They’re Allied soldiers, and Americans to boot. They’ll be strong men, very fit and well-coordinated. The Americans feed their soldiers well, so they won’t be weak from half-rations like local labor probably would be. And even if they fight and are killed for it, there will always be more to capture. So the question is, what are they building that requires a lot of strong men to make it happen?_

Hours later, night was coming on, and she was starting to tire some. She didn’t dare stop yet, but instead slowed to a walk. From over the rise that the tracks were climbing, she heard the distant sound of human activity, the first she’d heard in hours. She had passed a couple of farms along the way, but they had been as quiet as tombs, their residents either dead or gone. The track she had been following suddenly joined a rough road, and she stopped at the edge of it.

Then she scooted back into the brush, just as a cargo van rumbled up the road and past the clump of bushes where she’d hidden herself. Taking care to stay behind the branches, she eyed the driver. He wore a black uniform, with the distinctive red skull-and-tentacles emblem of HYDRA as a patch on his shoulder.

 _Definitely HYDRA. Those bastards have to be around here somewhere._ Perhaps the sounds she’d been starting to hear were from their camp. They certainly seemed to be coming from the direction the van had come from.

_As good a place to start as any._

She waited until the van was well on down the road before moving, sticking to the trees but following the road cut through the forest. It was a fairly new road, with raw brush on either side that had been cut away only recently, and continued to wind up the long slope.

Daria smelled the land mine before she found it. Laying her ears back, she sprang aside and landed in a crouch, growling softly. Most land mines were designed not to go off unless something heavy enough- that is, roughly human-sized- stepped into the trigger area.

Problem was, wolves were only a little lighter than humans, and therefore fully large enough to set the damn things off.

She snuffled, taking in as much scent as possible. The mine lay under a thin bit of forest debris, and the smell of human still clung to the damp earth as bare traces. It was a fairly new placement, then. She took several more deep breaths, and once she felt she had the scent of the man who’d placed the mine firmly in her nose, she began to track the faint path he’d made.  He’d been quite thorough, setting mines every ten yards or so in a huge ring that eventually looped right back to the first mine she’d discovered.  Another ten yards in, and she found a second ring of mines halfway offset from the first, then a third.

Daria stopped as she found the first mine of the innermost ring. It was on the very edge of the trees. From here, the forest had been clear-cut to make room for a very large camp and a huge complex of buildings. She couldn’t make out particulars from scent alone, because it all smelled to her like a combination of ‘military camp’ and ‘munitions factory’, with a heavy dose of unwashed man, human waste, and the bitter odor of fear and anger mixed in. A few dozen yards in from the trees was a very tall chain-link fence topped by rows of razor wire. Heavily-armed guards prowled just within the fence, on the ground and at the tops of several towers that had been constructed. These also held large search lights that swept restlessly along the forest’s edge in erratic patterns meant to foil intruders who sought to sneak in between passes.

She sat on her haunches, studying the scene before her. The entire complex, based on how far she’d traveled to loop around it, easily covered almost a dozen acres, and even at this hour there was a lot of activity inside. It seemed to be divided into three rough sections. Closest to the gate were what looked to be barracks, facilities for storing and maintaining vehicles, and administrative offices. Those would be for the HYDRA soldiers who worked here. Further in lay the truly large buildings, which seemed to be factories of some kind, and between here and there were rows and rows of trucks, vans, and tanks, all bearing the HYDRA insignia.

At the moment, most of the activity was centered on the third area, a very long building attached to the rear of the factories.  Taking eagle owl shape this time for absolutely silent flight, Daria flew over the fence to get a better look.

As she had suspected, this building was meant for the prisoners. A number of trucks and vans were parked behind it, and more HYDRA soldiers guarded a line of prisoners slowly shuffling their way into the building. She lit on a window ledge to peer inside. This building was quite tall, the windows very high up. Looking through them gave her a view of rows and rows of cages, each made of stout metal bars and holding anywhere from three to six men. Their clothes were ragged, and they looked as if they’d been worked to exhaustion, though not yet to the point of collapse except in a handful of cases. She mostly saw dull green American Army uniforms, but here and there she spotted the khaki-brown of British Army uniforms and the green-brown of a Canadian, even one fellow who looked distinctly French. To add to the confusion, she saw a wide variety of unit patches and other insignia as well. HYDRA must have been snatching up every prisoner they could find for miles around to ship them here. She was fairly sure that the US Army Rangers hadn’t been operating in the area, and as for the sole chap with the maroon beret of a British parachute brigade, well, he was quite far afield from where he had most likely been operating.  What startled her most was that one of the Rangers she spotted was of distinctly Japanese heritage. She had no idea what he was doing this far west. After Japan had attacked their naval base in Pearl Harbor, the States had all but panicked and set about rounding up citizens of Japanese descent for removal to specialized camps. Daria had been under the impression that the few Japanese-Americans who had enlisted after that had been sent to eastern Asia to fight. Apparently, though, not all of them had.

The men already in the cages grumbled and glared as HYDRA soldiers marched in new prisoners, shoving them in among the current occupants. The newcomers looked exhausted, and stumbled inside with little resistance.

Daria counted as best she could, coming up with a rough estimate of about three hundred men in total, some injured. She figured there would be anywhere between half that and an equal number of HYDRA personnel on the base.

_Now time to figure out where we are._

She spent some time circling the area, studying the layout of the terrain and committing landmarks to memory. The camp was well-hidden, nestled in among hills that concealed most of the glow from their lights, but she managed to pick out the shape of the hills and a nearby river that would help her orient herself on her maps. From there, it was simple enough to find a spot on the roof with enough light to read the maps.

Once she had calculated the camp’s position, she fished out her radio and switched it on.

“Noclaf to Camp Blowitup,” she said. She grimaced as she said it. Honestly, who had nicknamed that place? Probably someone who thought he was cleverer than he really was. Still, she had been asked to refer to the camp by its nickname, in case anyone happened to be listening in to her broadcast. “Come in camp.”

 _“This is Camp Blowitup,”_ came the voice of the radio operator, scratchy and crackling with distance and distortion. “ _Go ahead, Noclaf._ ”

“I’ve located the HYDRA base and am in position to continue recon.” She spoke as clearly as she could, wanting to make sure the operator heard and understood every word. “The facility appears to be a factory of some sort. Confirmed over two hundred, possibly three hundred prisoners. It’s near Azzanno. Coordinates are-“ She glanced at the map and read off the coordinates she’d marked.

“Copy that, Noclaf,” came the radio operator’s reply. “Your orders are to remain on-site and continue recon for the next twenty-four hours, then return to base to make a full report. The colonel wants you to try and figure out what they’re making over there.”

“I copy, base. Next contact at 2300 hours. Noclaf out.”

She clicked off the radio and put it and the maps back into their waterproof pouch, then sat back on her heels to consider her next move.

There was no chance she was going to try and stay awake for the next twenty-four hours and then fly back to base. She would need a secure nook somewhere to take a nap. Fortunately, there were always plenty of places that would accommodate a cat or an owl and not draw human notice.

The Germans may have begun to fear rumors of a gryphon striking them seemingly at random, but they hadn’t yet connected the gryphon’s appearance with that of small animals nosing around their facilities.

That would be for a bit later. She wanted to keep looking around a bit as things quieted down.  Late at night, the prisoners wouldn’t be working, which meant fewer guards to watch out for, and fewer facility staff.

It was easy enough to get into the facility as a cat. She merely slipped inside after a soldier and scurried on silent paws into a patch of shadow. Her coat was a handsome brown, with dark stripes in the pattern called marbled tabby, and so blended in easily into the darkness.

As the lines shut down and people left for the night, she began her explorations. The factory- for a factory indeed it was- was absolutely enormous, and was being used to produce very large mechanical components. She was no engineer, and so couldn’t entirely make out what the large pieces were.  Along another assembly line, though, she found things that she could recognize. Here, HYDRA was assembling weapons. Rifles, for the most part, all equipped with an attachment that glowed electric blue.

Glancing about to check if anyone was nearby, she slipped out from between two racks of the big silver components, scampered across the floor, and leaped up onto the line of rifles.  She sniffed at one curiously and almost sneezed. The glowing bit gave off much the same scent as the charred patch she’d examined in the battlefield, minus the scent of smoke.

 _So. HYDRA’s building and using new toys. Whatever they used in that fight, they’re building them here._ She would try to grab one or two before she left tomorrow night. Perhaps the SSR’s pet mechanical engineer Howard Stark could make something of them.

Voices approached, and Daria scrambled out of sight behind some equipment just as a couple of Germans pushing carts came down to her end of the factory floor. They talked quietly among themselves as they piled up rifles and stacked them on the cart, then rolled them away.

She licked her whiskers thoughtfully, then padded along in their wake. They left the main factory floor and turned into a huge room. Here she stopped and simply stared.

There were rows upon rows of racks of rifles here, and further beyond, huge torpedo-shaped objects that looked to be twice as long as she was tall in her own form. Soldiers prowled the narrow aisles in between, carrying the same sort of rifles as were stacked on the racks. There were shelves upon shelves of smaller components too, many with some small bit that glowed such a brilliant blue-white there was hardly any need for additional lighting.

The sight of it all made the fur on her back stand on end and her tail puff out to three times its normal size as she flattened her ears. There were so many weapons here, and if those torpedo-shaped objects were missiles…

She really didn’t want to think how much damage just one of those might cause, much less dozens of them. Could anything stand against such firepower?

 _We have to destroy this place_ , she realized. This wasn’t just a matter of rescuing captured soldiers anymore. If HYDRA managed to bring this much firepower to the German side, the Allies would be severely outmatched, and they might not be able to hold out long enough to catch up. This room alone represented a critical tactical advantage that had to be nullified if they were going to stay in the fight. And if there were more rooms like this…

Daria shuddered, and had to spend a few minutes licking her fur back down before she felt settled enough to continue her snooping.

As the night went on, she scouted out most of the main factory. At one end she found a small medical facility that smelled like fear and death. Her fur puffed out again at the scent, but she forced herself to enter. At the moment, the corridor with its rows of small rooms was empty and dark, as were the rooms. Even the office at the end was empty of people.

Taking her own shape, she laid her hands on the lock and focused hard. Of her three gifts, telekinesis was by far the weakest, and she rarely relied upon it. It was, however, well suited for picking locks.

These tumblers were a bit stiff, and a headache had started to form between her eyes by the time she finished mentally wrestling them into place. The lock finally clicked, and she stepped inside. In the dim light, she saw piles of papers scattered on the desk, and a chalkboard covered with equations and notes in German. She made a face in disgust at this. Her German was good enough that she considered herself fluent, but it was all conversational German. This all looked very technical, with only about half the words derived from Latin in any recognizable form. What little she did recognize all seemed to be medical terminology, all related to one phrase. It was written in the top left corner of the chalkboard in bold white letters:  _Um den Übermenschen zu schaffen._

 _To create the superman_.

She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck.  She had known that HYDRA was trying to recreate Erskine’s project, but she hadn’t expected to stumble across their progress- especially here in a munitions factory.

_On the other hand, where better? They’ll have all the infrastructure and guards and prisoners to test on that they need._

A low growl escaped her throat, anger rising over the horror. They were using _her_ to do this. Her blood, her genetic code, to experiment on people they had snatched on the field of battle and forced into hard labor.  This could not be allowed to continue. She would not allow it to continue.

With a snarl of rage she snatched up an eraser and scrubbed it viciously across the blackboard, wiping away every chalked line and symbol. Then she grabbed every paper she could find that had more of those notes on them and folded them into a thick packet that she stuffed into her jacket.

She probably didn’t get all of the notes- scientists were notorious for squirreling away notebooks and papers- but with luck this would slow them down for a while and make it difficult to continue their experiments. There was no chance she would hand over the papers to Phillips and the United States Army, however. She fought on their side, but her loyalty would not go so far as to tamely hand them whatever keys to her genetic code the HYDRA scientists had managed to piece together. As soon as she got the chance, she would destroy the papers.

For a moment, she was tempted, very tempted, to set a fire in the office. Then common sense reasserted itself. No. She couldn’t draw attention, any more than she already would with her furious destruction and theft of these notes. A fire would just have to wait, until tomorrow night, perhaps.

She continued checking each room along the corridor, moving as quietly as she could over the tiled floor. There was one room full of medical supplies and chemicals, all labeled in German that she could barely understand. Three of the other four rooms were windowless examination- or experimentation- rooms, each equipped with a chair that had sturdy straps attached to restrain the occupant. The chairs bore an unsettling resemblance to those used to carry out executions by electrocutions, though she didn’t see the electrical leads needed for that particular process anywhere.

The last room was like the previous three, only a lot larger, and a light was on inside. She crouched a little so she could just barely peek in through the window set into the door. Like the other three rooms, this one was full of medical equipment, including something that looked like a hospital bed- if hospital beds were covered in straps to restrain their occupants and strewn with other bits of scanning equipment. There was a man at the far end of the room scribbling notes on another chalkboard, working from a little leather-bound notebook he held in one hand. With her lack of technical German it was hard to make out exactly what he was writing about, but she was willing to be bet it was more notes about the supersoldier project.

She clenched her hands, longing to run in and deal with him and his notes. If she could take out this man, clearly the scientist who worked from the office she had just vandalized given the similarity of his handwriting, she could potentially cripple HYDRA’s attempts to make supersoldiers derived from her blood. She could-

Footsteps behind her, loud and measured. Daria whirled, biting back a curse as two guards marched around the corner.

“ _Sie!”_ one shouted as they drew up short. His companion snatched up the rifle slung across his chest. _“Sie! Stopp!”_

She most certainly wasn’t going to ‘ _stopp_ ’.

Instead, she flung herself in a long shallow dive _towards_ the two guards, under the spray of bullets the second fired off. Popping up in front of them, she knocked the rifle aside and punched the guard in the face.

She regretted it just a little, since the only part of his face not protected by a mask and helmet was his nose and mouth. His teeth cut gouges into her knuckles that stung and smarted painfully. He was knocked off his feet by the force of the blow, and she whirled to kick the other guard in the chest.

He went flying, though not as far as his friend given that there was a rather solid wall in the way. He struck it with a thud and the sound of something popping before sliding to the floor.

Daria ran, rounding the corner just as the door of the big examination room opened and the scientist she’d seen called out. His inquiry became a cry of alarm, and as she sprinted down another corridor an alarm began blaring.

 _“Dammit!”_ she swore under her breath. Now the whole place would be roused, alerted to the presence of an intruder. As she ducked through the door and onto one of the walkways surrounding the factory floor, she spotted dozens of guards pouring out of other corridors and rooms. They looked a bit disorganized- no surprise given the hour- but they looked awake enough to be plenty lethal if they caught her.

Her eyes went to the windows high above. They were three stories up at least, but if she could get up there she could probably get through and escape. It would just be getting up there that was the tricky bit. She didn’t dare shapeshift in front of these witnesses. She was going to have to climb up there.

Coming up alongside a guard just stepping out of a doorway, she ripped his rifle from his hands and struck him across the back of the head with the butt of it, knocking him over the edge of the raised walkway to strike the concrete below in a heap. Then she paused just long enough to aim and fire a spray of bullets at the windows. They shattered, sending a hailstorm of sparkling glass shards raining to the floor. Several HYDRA workers who’d still been busy shuffling supplies and components around yelped and shielded their heads and faces against the razor-sharp fragments.

A bullet whizzed past her ear, and she reflexively dropped to the floor to make a smaller target. Her ear rang with the concussion. She shook her head to try and clear it and ran in a crouch along the catwalk, trying to find cover. There wasn’t much, apart from the thin metal struts.

There was, however, a very large piece of mechanical equipment nearby, and a lattice-like pylon just a little ways beyond that.

She popped up and fired, sending one guard dropping to the floor clutching at his leg and several others scattering. Then she flung the rifle at the head of another coming onto the walkway and vaulted over the railing. Landing on the machine, she ran along a long narrow metal beam before leaping onto the pylon. This was almost as easy to climb as a ladder, and she swarmed up it.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a tall, lean man dressed in the long leather coat of a top-ranked German officer step through a doorway. He drew her attention almost immediately- he had a sort of _presence_ about him, something icy and cruel and overwhelmingly _powerful_ , perfectly assured of its place in the world. She glanced down at him, and for a moment their eyes met.

She’d never seen someone so _sanely_ mad before. There was something in those eyes that spoke of a mindset so perfectly reasoned through and at the same time so skewed from actual reality that it was terrifying- not for what the reasoning implied, but because it was so confident and assured it was right that it made you question whether or not _you_ were mad for accepting reality. This was the kind of man who could talk you into doing anything he wanted, and you would follow because he had you convinced that to do otherwise was the insane option.

And she saw, for the briefest instant, a tell-tale jewel-like flash off those eyes.

Johann Schmidt regarded her for a moment with a look of disdain and drew a pistol, aiming it directly at her.

Daria glared at it, straining with her telekinesis to knock the gun out of line. It bucked wildly in Schmidt’s hand at the same time a headache struck between her eyes, momentarily half-blinding her. She yelped and nearly slipped, only just managing to regain her grip and make herself _move_ , scrambling up the pylon.

 _“Erschieß ihn!”_ she heard Schmidt snarl just as she hauled herself onto the top of the pylon. Bullets buzzed about her, one even burying itself in a metal strut just to the left of her foot and a second ripping through the side of her jacket to miss her by a fraction of an inch. She did yelp then, and reflexively shied away.

That was nearly her undoing, as her foot met empty air. She twisted, forcing herself to fall forwards rather than back, and sprawled along the length of the pylon.

Then-

“ _Stopp!”_

Schmiddt’s voice rang out over the sound of gunfire, and silence fell over the factory floor as the head of HYDRA stepped a little further out onto the observation platform. He regarded her for a moment, eyes narrowed in consideration.

“That vas quite impressive,” he said in heavily accented English. She heard him perfectly- he had a knack for projecting without yelling that she usually only saw in theater actors. “I must admit, I vas not expecting there to be another vith such abilities.”

She bared her teeth in a silent snarl. Despite the show of bravado, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had just made a very grave mistake in displaying one of her powers in front of him.

“I do not know vat Erskine told you,” he continued. “But you and I, ve vere made for more than these petty struggles. Ve are _different_. And together, ve could accomplish great things.”

Her snarl faded into a look of confusion.  “Are you asking me to _join_ you?” she asked, very nearly forgetting to keep her own voice pitched into the deeper register she used when pretending to be ‘Darian’.

“Vat have ve to gain from fighting one another?” he replied calmly. “You vould have quite a place in ze future I have foreseen.”

She eyed him with a frown. Foresight _was_ a gift that popped up now and again in her maternal line. Was it possible…?

“To build your future you inflict countless cruelties on those who disagree with you,” she pointed out.  Just to annoy him, she affected the most posh and pompous accent she could muster, remembering one particularly puffed-up fellow she’d seen in the House of Lords once. “I’m terribly sorry, old chap, but I’m afraid that just isn’t my cup of tea. You do understand. Now, I really must dash!”

She had slowly been gathering herself as she spoke. Now, as Schmidt’s look of dismay at her flippancy turned to rage, she leaped, grabbing on to the frame of one of the big windows and slinging herself through the hole that had been shot through it.

There was only empty air on the other side, and she fell through space, twisting to orient herself. As the ground rushed to meet her, she traded arms for wings and all but fell into the shape of an eagle-owl.  She caught herself and flapped madly for the trees, flying as fast as she possibly could.

The base looked like someone had kicked an anthill. Guards swarmed the place, half rushing for posts around the fence or in the big tower, half rushing towards the factory. Daria flew over them all, a silent shadow. By the time she reached the trees, there were already teams leaving the base to scour the woods, in case she somehow managed to make it that far.

Well, she had, just not in a form anyone would recognize.

She didn’t stop until she was about a mile away from the camp, finding a thick patch of trees overlooking the road. There she perched, panting with fear and exertion.

_Schmidt. Schmidt is here. They’re working on reverse engineering Project Rebirth in there and Schmidt is here. And now he knows there’s at least one person with powers skulking about, bloody hell that was stupid of me…_

But it had been the best way she had to keep him from shooting her. And at least she’d managed to destroy and escape with some of those notes. She knew when she shifted back they would still be there, hidden under her jacket.

 _I’d better destroy those before I go back to the camp_.

For now, though, the best thing she could do would be to rest, and to give the base a bit of time to settle back into something like a normal routine. And after that fight, she was starving.

Once she caught her breath, she flew deeper into the woods, well past any sound of HYDRA activity. She found a tiny hollow, and within its protection she lit a tiny fire to heat some of the rations she’d brought with her- and burn the notes. They crackled away quite merrily, curling up into nothing more than grey ash as the flames licked across them.

The food calmed her, and by the time she was finished eating and burning the papers she was more than ready to rest. Not here, though, and not in her own shape. A large dead tree nearer the camp and about a quarter of the way around its perimeter from the road proved to be an excellent place for an owl to roost. As dawn approached, she finally slept.


	6. The Star Spangled Man With A Plan

She never slept long out in the field, especially when she was in enemy territory. A few hours before noon she woke, fluffing up all her feathers and shaking them out. She was hungry again, and she wanted to report in early. Phillips needed to know that the missing men weren’t just in HYDRA’s hands, but in Schmidt’s hands. He might want to try a strike at Schmidt directly if he could manage it.

She studied the fork of the tree she’d been sleeping in, decided it would hold her weight, and shifted back to her own form.  Then she pulled out the radio.

There was a very large hole punched through the side of it. She gave it an experimental shake, and after a bit of rattling a deformed bullet fell out.

The bullet that had just missed her the night before.

“Oh that’s not good,” she said aloud. Ought she abandon her mission and head back to the camp early?

No, no, there was still more she could learn by watching the place for the rest of the day, as she had planned. She had gotten a good idea of the place’s layout the night before, but still had little notion of how it normally operated. Phillips and anyone he dragged into helping him plan a rescue operation would need to know that information.

And maybe she could take another stab at destroying more of those Project Rebirth notes, or something else interesting and shiny that would seriously annoy Schmidt. If she could pull off a stunt like that without putting the prisoners too much at risk.

No. She would stay, and finish her assignment before flying back to the base.

Well, no point in starting on an empty stomach.

She decided to save the rest of her rations and instead hunt as an owl. The fresh meat would do her better, and she would not need so much food in owl shape as she would in her own. A couple of unsuspecting mice soon became her breakfast.

And then she was back to work, slowly making her way around the perimeter of the HYDRA base. She watched them, all unnoticed, as the prisoners were put to work in the factory, HYDRA technicians and mechanics worked on maintaining the rows of tanks and trucks gathered outside, and guards oversaw everything. They looked rather more nervous today than they had last night, and drove the prisoners mercilessly. Daria could only assume that was the result of her visit. No one looked too exhausted to work, but it was plain that the prisoners who had been there longer were nearing the ends of their reserves of strength. If they were forced to keep working at this pace, they would start dropping on the spot.

She maintained her watch throughout the day, even spending several hours within the camp itself in the shape of a tabby cat, the better to listen to what was going on or get access to places hard to see from the outside.  As night fell, the prisoners were herded back into their cages. Quite a few of them had to be prodded in the back with the clubs the guards carried.

She watched as a guard, apparently bored with prodding one heavyset ginger man with a rather magnificent mustache into his cage, raised his club and knocked the man’s bowler hat off his head.

The man turned, very slowly, and gave the guard a very intent look. “You know, Fritz,” he said. His voice was very calm, almost perfectly even despite the fury burning in his eyes. “One day I’m gonna have a stick of my own.”

She couldn’t see the guard’s face from where she perched, but she saw the slight twitch of his head, as if he were smirking at the prisoner even as he shut and locked the cage door.  The man with the mustache slowly picked up his bowler and dusted it off before dropping himself down to sit between the British parachuter and a black American soldier, grumbling to himself.

_Huh. Lot of spirit left in these blokes,_ Daria thought. _Give them a set of keys and a few rifles and they might just shoot their way out without much prompting._  She considered this as she preened her wing feathers. Ought she try to arrange for a prison break? It wouldn’t be hard. She would just need to take out the two guards that had taken up positions patrolling the room of cells and steal their keys, then help clear a path out to the room where the rifles these very men were making were being stored. They were soldiers; they would do the rest themselves.

_The sooner, the better_ , she realized. _If they have to wait for very long, they’ll only get weaker. HYDRA wasn’t feeding them much. Right now, they’re as strong as they’re going to get while they’re here. Waiting for Phillips to arrange a rescue will only mean more of them will die before they can get out of here._

She realized she seemed to have made up her mind without noticing, and roused all her feathers before shaking herself out and slicking them down again. Alright then. So she was going to arrange to spring three hundred men from prison. If she was going to do it tonight, she had better start by making sure there was a reasonably clear path between them, the guns, and the way out.

She abandoned her perch by the window of the prison room and flew silently around the factory, trying to scope out a good exit point. A supply shipment had come in a bit earlier in the evening, and the loading docks were swarming with people intent on unloading the trucks of equipment and materials. Most of the guards had been drawn towards the activity. That pleased her, for more guards out here would give the prisoners that much more freedom to prepare themselves before meeting them.

One bit of movement caught her eye, and she banked to get a better look.

A guard that had been leaning down to peer into the back of a truck suddenly went flying straight back as if struck with tremendous force and struck the wall behind him.

A moment later, a big man carrying a shield painted to resemble the American flag jumped lightly out of the truck, grabbed the downed guard, and dragged him out of sight.

_What the bloody hell did I just watch?_

She swooped down to follow as the man with the shield made his way along the rows of trucks and tanks, always heading towards the factory. He wore an American army uniform over a blue shirt and a rather bright blue helmet with the chin strap hanging loose, and moved confidently, if with a little lack of coordination. He put her in mind of a puppy, one of those big breeds that took a long time to grow into their oversized paws. When he jumped from the ground to the top of a tank and from there onto the roof of a low building that ran towards the factory, she began to have a guess as to who he might be.

_Oh no._

He didn’t notice as she slipped behind him. He was too busy knocking on the factory door to draw the attention of the guard just inside. When the guard opened it, the American slammed it on his head, then dropped him with a punch and dragged him outside.

Daria silently resumed her own form and darted in, covering his mouth with her hand as she grabbed his shoulder.

_“Be silent!”_ she hissed in his ear, having to stand on tiptoe to do it since he had easily a hand’s span of height on her. She reinforced the words with a mindspoken projection, sending them directly into his mind. He tensed under her, muscles tightening as he prepared to strike at her. “Don’t you dare,” she warned. “I believe you are just as much an enemy of HYDRA as I am. Go inside. Ten paces to your right will be a small conference room. Go in there. There’s a window, so do not turn on the light.”

The man remained tense, but it wasn’t the kind of tension that broadcasted an attack. Slowly he nodded, and she let him go, following him into the conference room and shutting the door behind her.

Then she set her hands on her hips and got her first good look at Steve Rogers.

_Oh no,_ she thought, trying not to stare. _He’s gorgeous._

She quickly buried that particular thought. It was hard, though, taking in that lovely strong jaw and powerful build. It was his eyes that drew her attention most. They were blue, sparkling with intelligence and determination- and a little of the distinctive glitter of Tau’ka eyes.

“Who the _hell_ are you?” he demanded, brow furrowed in a glare.

That quickly chased any thoughts about his good looks out of her mind, and she drew herself up to meet him glare for glare. It didn’t matter that he was at least four inches taller than she was and easily that much broader in the shoulder, this was _her_ mission and what the hell was _he_ doing out here when _he_ had absolutely zero field experience?

“Agent Darian Noclaf, British Intelligence,” she growled. “Attached to the SSR. _I_ am here because Colonel Chester Phillips assigned me to scout out where the hell HYDRA had gone off to with the prisoners from the 107 th Infantry Division. _I_ am here under orders because I have the skills and experience to determine just what is required for a rescue mission and to judge whether I can pull one off myself.”

Alright, that was stretching it just a tiny bit, since Phillips hadn’t exactly intended that she free the prisoners herself, but she was more than a little peeved that someone with as little training as he had gotten was here putting everything at risk. And if the worse happened and HYDRA captured him…

“And just who the hell are _you?_ ” she demanded, still glaring at him.

His stubbornness hadn’t faded one jot, but he did look a little startled. “Noclaf?” he repeated. “Peggy Carter’s friend?”

_So Peggy told you about me? I wonder what she said…_

“Yes,” she said. “Peggy’s an old friend of mine. That doesn’t answer my question, soldier.”

That seemed to be the right tone to take, for he shifted his posture slightly and came to attention.  “Captain Steve Rogers,” he said, hesitating only slightly over his title. “I’m here to break the prisoners out of HYDRA custody.” He hesitated again, now giving her a puzzled look. “Phillips said there wasn’t going to be an official rescue operation until the war was over.”

“Of course he told you that,” she said dryly. “Because you, last I heard, are supposed to be part of a show meant to drum up support for the troops and sell war bonds. How did you get out here anyway?”

“Peggy convinced Howard Stark to air drop me a couple miles from here,” he said. “I came the rest of the way on foot.”

That had to explain the guns she had heard going off earlier, and she reluctantly had to admit she was impressed he’d gotten past the rings of mines. She scowled at him anyway. “Peggy,” she repeated. “She let you come out here alone-“

“I didn’t exactly give her much choice,” Rogers cut in quickly. “I was about to take a truck from the camp when she found me and offered to help.” He at least had the decency to look a little sheepish.

Daria groaned and rubbed her temples. “And why were you so bound and determined to walk into a HYDRA camp all by yourself?”

The sheepishness vanished, to be replaced by that stubborn determination again. “Because HYDRA took my best friend,” he said. “And I’m going to get him out, no matter what it takes.” He held her gaze, suddenly full of challenge ready to be let loose if she dared to try and send him back. As he said, one way or the other he _was_ going to rescue his friend.

She mulled over her options. He hadn’t done a half-bad job getting _in_ to the camp. She’d seen how easily he had slipped into the factory, and how quiet he’d been when dealing with the guards.

Breaking the prisoners out would go over more easily with two people running things than one alone.  And he _was_ a product of Project Rebirth. He was easily a match for her in strength and speed, even if he wasn’t fully trained.

“I won’t leave without Bucky-“ he began when he saw her trying to decide what to do with him.

She waved away his protests. “No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d made up my mind to try to free the prisoners already. We’re going to need to deal with guards long enough to get about three hundred men out of their cells and to some kind of weapon. You can help with that.”

He blinked at her in surprise. “Three hundred?” he repeated. “There were only about a hundred from the 107th…”

“It’s not just the 107th they’ve got,” she told him. “I spent last night poking around. It looks like HYDRA’s been grabbing every POW it can get its hands on and bringing them here to work in the factory. But that’s good, three hundred men ought to be enough to punch a nice clean hole through the defenses and get out of here.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “We need to make it clear to them, though, that they have to leave through the main gate and follow the main road for at least twenty  yards. There’s a few rings of land mines out there we’re going to want them to avoid.”

“I followed the road coming in,” he admitted.  “I didn’t know about the mines.”

“Then you were lucky,” she replied. “They only extend out a little ways out from the fence, so once we get the men beyond that point we should be fine. They’re being held in a large containment room at the end of the factory floor, in cells. With the new lot just brought in, there’s about six men in each, but there’s only two guards prowling around down there. Seems like the rest are out supervising the unloading.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard to deal with.” Rogers’ eyes were narrowed slightly as he listened, his expression one of fierce concentration. “It will be getting past the guards on the floor that will be tricky. I only got a brief look before you accosted me, but I think I saw about eight or nine?”

“More than that.” Her estimation of him rose a notch. She hadn’t expected him to be able to make that kind of observation in the two seconds or so he’d gotten. “There’s another three up on the catwalks. But there are places around the perimeter that will give decent cover. We slip past, take out the guards in the prison room, nab their keys, and let the men out.”

He nodded. “I’ll grab the rifle from the guard I took out at the door and give it to someone. They’ll be able to help us lay down cover fire while the rest get to weapons.”

“Sounds like a plan. We point them in the direction of the tanks and get the bloody hell out of here.”  She moved towards the door, pausing to listen. “One last thing, Rogers- Johann Schmidt is here.”

Rogers hissed through his teeth. “ _Schmidt?”_

She glanced back at his low, angry tone. “Yes. Don’t go seeking him out. He isn’t what we’re here for- our main objective right now is to get those men out. If you happen to run into him, though, be careful. If you get a clean shot at him, take it. But don’t take risks, Rogers. You’re too valuable.”

“I’m not that-“

“Yes, you are, and I’m not going to run the risk of having your government get pissed at _me_ because I let you run off and get your fool ass killed on recon operation you weren’t even supposed to be on.” She glared at him, biting back the low growl of warning that threatened to rumble through her chest.  His jaw was set at that mulishly stubborn angle again, and he opened his mouth to protest. “No. You won’t do your friend or the rest of these men any good if you get killed. Don’t take foolish chances. That isn’t heroism, Rogers, that’s idiocy. Heroism is doing the _right_ thing, not the stupid thing.”

He clenched his jaw and pushed past her to listen at the door himself. “We’ve got some space between guards,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Somehow she didn’t think he wouldn’t do something stupid if he thought that stupid thing would get him closer to finding his friend.

_My job is to get him out of here in one piece. There will be plenty of time to train a bit of common combat sensibility into him later. Which, incidentally, won’t be my job._

“Keep your head down and keep out of sight,” she said. “Go. Before someone wonders why there’s no one at that door.”

He nodded and inched the conference room door open, slipping through it. She followed him.

Daria kept a close eye on him as they picked their way around the edge of the factory floor, slipping between stacks of components and racks with weapons in hand, once stopping to grab a couple of rifles as they ducked behind a pillar. As they edged behind a table stacked with glowing blue components, Rogers paused and grabbed one of those too.

“Maybe Stark can figure out what these are,” he whispered.

She nodded and grabbed one for good measure. It never hurt to have more than one sample, in case something went terribly wrong.

After all, things had been going rather wrong for much of the last two days. First setting off the alarm, then having Schmidt show up unexpectedly, and now having someone with all the combat experience of a green rookie fresh out of boot camp underfoot.

Alright, that was probably a bit unfair. She’d seen the wheels turning in that head of his. He was quick to grasp the situation presented to him and he clearly had a head for tactics. And he was Erskine’s personal pick.

Mostly she was just annoyed that someone as green as he was had snuck off without orders on a mission that really ought to be suicide for a single person to attempt. And had wandered right into _her_ operation without any kind of warning at all. That was the kind of stunt that got people killed if they were anything less than extremely lucky.

If he kept up the good work, though, she might just get over her irritation.

They made it to the prison room without incident. From the shadowed alcove, they watched the two guards pace along the length of it. For most of their pacing, they were in sight of one another, which would ordinarily make taking them both out rather difficult.

She covered Rogers’s mouth with her hand to keep him silent. < _No noise_ > she warned. He stiffened under her, twisting in her hold so he could look at her. < _You’re not crazy. I just have a few talents we’re going to need to discuss later. I am going to turn into an owl and take out that far guard while you take the nearer one. I’m going to need you to give me a bit of a boost since it’s tight quarters here. >_

He opened his mouth to speak. She shook her head sharply in warning. Only when he closed his mouth again did she withdraw her hand and step back a little.

He looked a _lot_ taller to her as an owl than he did when she was in her own shape. His eyes went huge as he stared down at her.

< _Ever seen a falconer?_ > she asked him. When he shook his head, she just fluffed her feathers. < _This bit is easy. Just let me step up onto your wrist._ >

Slowly he knelt and offered her his hand, which was covered by a study leather glove. She stepped onto it, half furling her wings for balance as he straightened again. < _Now, when both guards are moving away from us, give me a good firm toss right out into the room. They won’t hear me. Owls don’t make noise._ >

He nodded, and as instructed, flung her into the air. He did it rather harder than she was expecting, and had to flail a little to steady herself, but she got herself airborne and was quickly well above the guards’ line of sight. She flew silently to the further end of the long room, then ducked down into a patch of shadow and resumed her own shape.

< _Ready when you are._ >

She thought, for one very bizarre moment, that she heard a faint reply to her Mindspoken words.

She shook her head and focused on the job at hand. Rogers was already creeping up on his guard. She ghosted towards the second, and at very nearly the same time, they struck.

Both HYDRA soldiers dropped bonelessly onto the catwalks over the rows of narrow cells. Below them, men looked up in surprise.

Rogers found keys on his guard’s belt. He grabbed them, then climbed down to the floor. Daria was right behind him.

“Who are you supposed to be?” the black man she’d noticed earlier asked, looking in confusion at Rogers and the patriotic shield still slung over his back.”

Rogers stared at him for a moment, clearly scrambling for an answer. “I’m, uh… I’m Captain America.”

The British parachuter gave him a puzzled look. “I beg your pardon?”

“He’s with me,” Daria said, raising her voice a little so her fellow Brit could hear. “Agent Noclaf, MI6.”

“Ah.” He nodded, straightening his red beret. “Very good then.”

Rogers began opening the cell doors, letting the prisoners out as Daria oversaw organizing them and making sure everyone got out. She didn’t want to leave everyone behind.

“What, are we taking everybody?”

That was the man with the mustache and bowler hat. He eyed the Japanese-American man with a look of deep suspicion.

To Daria’s amusement, the impertinent question was met with a very irritated glare and a set of dog tags with the name Morita stamped on them. “I’m from _Fresno_ , Ace,” Morita retorted before stalking off to make his way towards the door.

Rogers pushed his way through the crowd. He was taller than most of them, and craned his neck to peer around and search each face that passed him.

“Is there anybody else?” he asked as he fell in next to the parachuter. “I’m looking for a Sergeant James Barnes.”

 “There’s an isolation ward at the end of the factory,” he replied, “But no one’s ever come back from it.”

“It’s at the far end, second floor up from the ground floor,” Daria added. “I was snooping around there last night. There’s three small examination rooms, a larger one, a supply room, and an office. I would check the big exam room first.”

Rogers nodded. “Alright,” he said, turning to address the group. “Tree line is northwest about forty yards beyond the main gate. Get out fast and give ‘em hell. I’ll meet you guys out there with anybody else I find.” He glanced at Daria, who nodded agreement.

The black man frowned. “Wait. You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Sure.” Rogers just gave a little shrug. “I’ve knocked out Adolf Hitler over two hundred times.”

Then he turned and ran down the length of the hall, intent on getting to the isolation ward.

Daria and the freed prisoners just stared after him, with mingled looks of shock on their faces.

_I think I have made a huge mistake._

She gave herself a moment to just rub her temples against the headache she felt building there before turning to the two men closest to her- the Brit and the American with the bowler hat.

“You two,” she said, making her voice brisk despite still nursing a desire to beat her head against a wall. “Names?”

“Sergeant Timothy Dugan,” the man with the bowler hat said. “My friends call me Dum-Dum.”

Daria exchanged a slightly pained look with the British officer before looking back at Dugan. “Well then, Dum-Dum,” she said. “You and-“ Once against she looked at the British officer.

“Major James Montgomery Falsworth,” he supplied helpfully. 

“And Falsworth. There’s rather a lot of tanks outside. Why don’t we see if we can grab one?”

Dugan’s grin was just a little bit manic. “I like the way you think, Noclaf. Don’t you worry, we’ll be rollin’ out of here in no time at all.”

She smiled crookedly and headed for the single door to the outside. It was locked, of course, but mechanical locks only needed a little prodding for her to get open. Drawing the sword from her back, she kicked it open with a yell and rushed out, pouncing on the nearest guard. She flicked the blade once, and the guard went down with blood spurting from his sliced throat.

The prisoners poured out after her in a roaring tidal wave, eager to get a little of their own back after days or week of bullying and humiliation and enforced labor at the hands of their captors. They fell upon the HYDRA soldiers with enthusiastic  yells, going after them with nothing more than their bare fists and determination.

They weren’t bare-handed for long. In moments, they began snatching up their enemies’ weapons, turning the rifles with their strange blue energy blasts back on their former wielders. That wasn’t all they took either. As Daria sprinted across an open space and vaulted over the bed of a truck to pounce on a guard taking aim at a cluster of prisoners, she caught a glimpse of Dugan and Falsworth hauling themselves up into the open hatch of tank.

“ _Waaaa-hooo!”_ she heard over the din a moment later.

More guards began pouring out of the factory and from other buildings, raining blue bolts and more traditional bullets upon the escapees. Many fell, or simply vanished in a flare of blue light. The prisoners shouted to one another, warning each other of enemies or potential targets, automatically forming up into clusters to fight their way through.

Daria jumped up onto the front of a tank and swarmed up to the top to get a look around. They would need to fight their way around the factory to get to the main gate. That would be a lot harder if they started moving in the wrong direction, as they were starting to do. The men were instinctively veering towards the HYDRA guards coming to face them, rather than towards the main gate.

A guard turned to aim at her. She flung herself off the tank, dropped to the ground, and rolled to absorb the shock of the impact. Popping up once more, she ran the man through with her sword, the blade sliding neatly into his chest and out once again. She kicked the body away before it could fall on its own.

“Noclaf!” Falsworth shouted over the din. He’d made himself a comfortable perch behind the gun of his tank. “Which way to the gate?”

She broke into a run. “Tell Dugan to follow me!” she shouted back. Ducking and weaving to make herself a less attractive target, she headed for the main gate. Behind her, the tank growled to life and started rolling along. Falsworth fired several times, clearing a path for her.

Inside the factory, an alarm began to blare. This wasn’t the same one she had heard last night, having a different ear-grating tone. A few guards not immediately occupied with blasting away at the escaping prisoners paused to look back towards the factory, their postures one of alarm and worry.

If HYDRA guards were worried, Daria was damn sure she didn’t want to stick around any longer than was absolutely necessary. They needed to get out of here.

A moment of hesitation proved to be a fatal choice for a pair of HYDRA guards. As they looked at the factory, Daria bowled right through them, blood-slicked blade flashing once, twice, and cut them down. Above her head, the captured tank’s gun roared. The blast struck a nearby truck, making it go up in a tremendous explosion that knocked her off her feet. Ears ringing, she hauled herself to her hands and knees, only dimly aware of the tank’s treads bearing down on her.

“Whoa there!” An American soldier dashed in from her left, grabbing her by the collar and hauling her to her feet to drag her out of the way. “Tell whoever’s driving that thing to go squish HYDRA, not one of ours!”

She grinned, still a little wobbly and blinking spots out of her vision. “Thanks.”

Stumbling off, she managed to get herself sorted out enough to break back into a lope once again.

The freed prisoners were moving in the right direction now. The tank blasting merrily away at anything with a HYDRA emblem emblazoned upon it was a very useful beacon for them to orient on, and they fell in around and behind it. More HYDRA guards came to bear down upon them, but the soldiers, seeing freedom within their grasp, returned fire with redoubled ferocity.

“I see the gate!” Falsworth shouted. “Get out of the way, Noclaf!”

She darted out of the way and crouched by a dead HYDRA guard just long enough to wipe her blade clean on his uniform, then vaulted up onto their tank. Climbing up to the top, she clung to the edge of the gunner’s nest behind Falsworth.

“Mind opening the door?” she asked, giving him a feral grin.

His answer was an equally fierce grin and a pull of the trigger. Once more the gun roared, and a blue flash of light and energy simply devoured the front gate.  The prisoners let up a fierce cheer and began pouring through the gap in the base’s defenses.

< _KEEP TO THE ROAD!_ > she sent, in a widely-broadcast mental ‘shout’ to everyone she could reach.  Several men stumbled, looking about in shock and fear. When the unfamiliar voice didn’t choose to bypass their ears to shout directly into their minds again, however, they collected themselves and got moving once again. They poured through the hole Falsworth had blasted into the gate, making a break for the trees beyond the strip of clear ground that surrounded the camp.

“See Rogers anywhere?” Dugan shouted up from below.

Daria glanced about, trying to spot either his blue helmet or his very patriotic shield. “Not yet!” she called back. “Keep going, if he doesn’t meet us in the woods I’ll go back and look for him.”

“Bad idea.” That was the black soldier who’d asked Steve who he was supposed to be. “You’re the only one who knows how to get back to camp from here. Let’s not lose you.”

That was an excellent point, and she nodded reluctantly. They would just have to get away from the camp and hope Rogers managed to find them.

Falsworth swung the cannon around to fire back behind them, now they were rolling out of the base. Several more vehicles exploded, testament to his good eye.

She grinned fiercely down at him. “Nice shooting,” she said.

He grinned back up at her, all flashing teeth and vindictive satisfaction. “It’s nice to finally get a little of our own back.”

“How long were you in there?”

“Better part of three weeks now,” he replied. “I’ve been there longer than most of the other chaps.” His expression darkened, full of anger and pain. “I’m the last of my brigade still alive.”

Reaching down, she patted his shoulder in sympathy. “Then make those bastards bleed for what they’ve done.”

He nodded grimly and turned back to doing just that, raining electric-blue fire down upon any HYDRA guard who dared to attempt to follow them.

As they rolled out into the woods, Daria consulted her memories of the maps and the terrain she’d scouted the day before.

“Dugan?” she called. “There’s a large clearing about half a mile down the road. We’ll stop there and get organized and check the wounded while we wait for Rogers.”

“I hear ya,” he replied. He looked quite cheerful. Beside him, the black soldier peered up at her.

“You said your name was Noclaf, right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Darian Noclaf, MI6. I’m coordinating with the Strategic Scientific Reserve.”

“Gabe Jones, 92nd Infantry,” he replied.

She’d heard of the 92nd. That actually explained a bit. “I’ve heard of them. You boys do some good work.”

He grinned. “Why thank you. It’s nice to make an impression.”

“It’s certainly a good one.”

“Hey, Jones.” Dugan elbowed his co-pilot. “When we get to this clearing you’re gonna have to tell me which of these levers makes this bad boy stop. I don’t think z _ündung_ is gonna cut it.”

Since ‘z _ündung’_ meant ‘ignition’, Jones had every reason to laugh at Dugan as he was now doing. Daria smiled wryly and settled herself to watch their backs. At a guess, they had gotten well over half the prisoners out, maybe even three quarters. Some were limping, plainly exhausted or wounded, but many of their fellows looked like they wouldn’t mind giving HYDRA a few more pieces of their minds.

As the last handful of men stumbled out past the gates, a tremendous explosion rocked the entire valley.  Flames licked at the walls of the factory as portions of it began to cave in and collapse in heaps of burning rubble.

“My God,” Falsworth breathed.

Daria felt her stomach knot with worry. Was Rogers still in there, looking for his friend? Had she just let Captain America get himself killed?

“We keep going,” she said sternly, trying not to let the soldiers see her fear. “To the clearing. If Rogers hasn’t met us in two hours, we move on without him. Understood?”

They nodded, and were quiet until they reached the clearing. Several men dropped nearly where they stood, grateful for the rest after the fight and the rush to safety.

Daria eased herself to the ground. Her leg complained fiercely at the impact, and she looked down in surprise. The lower right leg of her trousers was dark with blood.

“Oh,” she said, a bit vaguely. When had that happened?

_Probably when something blew up_ , she thought. _Feels a bit like shrapnel. I should tidy that up._

As Falsworth dropped to the ground next to her, she sat down heavily and rolled up her trouser leg to inspect the wound. Several fragments of metal and plastic had dug themselves into her calf, leaving rather deep punctures.

“Oof,” he said, crouching next to her. “That does look nasty. Want a hand with that?”

She nodded. After a moment’s consideration, she shucked off her jacket, knowing she could just shapeshift to owl or wolf or even gryphon if she got too cold. “Just pull the bits out and stop the bleeding,” she said, starting to tear the garment into strips. “Using any supplies on me will just be a waste. I heal very quickly.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, then shrugged. “It’s your hide,” he pointed out. “If you want to risk gangrene-“

“I won’t be, but someone else might if they don’t get a share of what little we have.”

He shrugged and gripped her leg carefully to keep it still, then began the very unpleasant work of pulling the pieces of shrapnel from her flesh. “Whereabouts are you from?” he asked.

Daria recognized a question designed to distract her from the fact that someone was pulling metal out of oozing puncture wounds on her person. “London,” she replied. “What about you?” She cocked her head slightly. “Brummie?”

“That I am.” He smiled crookedly. “Born and raised. My family actually has a nice little manor a bit north of Birmingham proper.”

She hissed a little as he pried a particularly jagged piece free. “I’ve been up that way. Nice place.”

“It was before the Nazis decided to start using it for target practice, anyway. Hmm.” He studied her leg, squinting in the dim light. “I think I got it all out. Keep pressure on it and stay off that leg for a bit, if you’re going to be so stubborn as to not even bind it up proper.”

“I am. I’ll be fine.” She shoved the strips of cloth she’d torn up into his hands. “Start going around and help patch up anyone else who needs it.”

He nodded and moved off to do so. Daria simply sat where she was for a few minutes, catching her breath and waiting for the bleeding to stop. With her immune system, she wasn’t worried about infection. All she cared about was that she be able to walk back to the camp.

The freed prisoners milled about, some calling out and searching for friends or comrades, many nursing wounds of varying degrees. She frowned as she watched them, trying to calculate just how long it would take for them to get back on foot. Running and flying while in peak condition, it had taken _her_ the better part of a day. It would take them a lot longer by walking, especially with so many injured.

Someone had made off with a HYDRA truck and had parked it at the edge of the clearing. Daria nodded in approval. That would do well to carry some of the worst wounded. From where she sat, she could see several such.

Food was going to be a problem. A lot of these men had plainly been in captivity for a while, and wouldn’t have much in the way of physical reserves. Most of those would have been burned up in the fight to escape the HYDRA facility, making it even harder for them to go on. By contrast, the members of the 107th, the newest arrivals, looked much fresher- and that wasn’t saying a great deal.

By her count, it was roughly three days or so back to the camp, longer if they ran into trouble. Whatever supplies there might be in the tank and truck wouldn’t last long at all. They could possibly forage, but it was November, and there wouldn’t be much available.

_Though with as few signs of people around here as I’ve seen, what’s available won’t have been picked over by humans._

Still, foraging would slow them down. Could she possibly hunt enough to get them supplied with something?  She’d have to be very aggressive about it and take anything she could catch, with so many hungry mouths to feed. The cold would also be a problem…

She worried at the problem until shouts of greeting drew her attention. Getting to her feet and trying to put as little weight on her leg as possible, she moved to the edge of the clearing where Rogers was emerging from the forest. He supported another man, dark-haired and looking utterly exhausted and haunted. Rogers himself had a very protective air, all but hovering over the other man as a couple of the soldiers from the 107th came forward to relieve him of the burden.

“He was in the isolation ward,” he told the two soldiers. They nodded grimly and helped the man- he had to be Barnes, judging by the way Rogers kept on trying to hover- to sit down next to a tiny fire someone had gotten lit. “I think they might have been torturing him…”

Barnes certainly looked like someone had been trying to torture him.

Memories of the notes she’d destroyed flashed through her mind.

_Or worse._

Daria limped over to Rogers’s side. “You got him out of there,” she said. “That’s the important bit. What the hell happened? We were getting out of there and the whole place went up like Bonfire Night.”

“Schmidt,” he said, his jaw going tight. “He must have set a self-destruct. Tried to talk me into joining him.”

“He tried the same thing on me last night,” she told him. “I can see why he has so many people eating out of the palm of his hand- he’s persuasive enough that if you aren’t thinking clearly it would be easy to be taken in by that crap.”

“All the more reason to stop him.” Now he looked a little torn.

She knew that look, that questioning self-doubt. He would be asking himself if he should have gone after Schmidt, to stop him from hurting yet more people. “You did the right thing,” she said gently. “You got your friend out of there in one piece. That was your mission, not going right after Schmidt. There will be time for that later.”

He looked at her, and nodded. “There was a map in the isolation ward,” he said. “It had a whole bunch of HYDRA bases marked out on it. I have an idea of where he’ll be moving about now.”

Daria stared up at him. “You- you got locations of his bases?” she asked, stunned. She and Peggy and the SSR had only been dying to get their hands on that information for three years now. “You know where they are?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure if I see a map of the area, I’ll be able to mark them out pretty well.”

That was _wonderful_ news. Half the problem with fighting HYDRA had been that they had no idea where Schmidt was actually skulking around. He tended to keep well within the German lines, away from the Allies’ scouts and reconnaissance teams. If they had even a general idea of where the facilities were, they wouldn’t be fighting blind anymore.

Come hell or high water, Daria would personally ensure Steve got back safe with that valuable intelligence. She couldn’t yet justify just snatching him and flying back to the camp with him, but she would damn well make sure he got there.

“Phillips is probably going to want to kiss you when you tell him you know where HYDRA’s hiding,” she said, smiling wryly at the mental image. Hell, she was tempted to kiss him herself. “Right. We should try to cover a little more distance while they’re still scrambling and getting sorted out. There’s a meadow a bit further on next to a small river. We can make camp there.”

“How are we on supplies?”

“Haven’t gotten that far yet. We’ve been patching ourselves up and waiting for you to get back.”

Rogers nodded, looking around. “If we want to cover ground before what’s left of HYDRA back there can organize a hunt, then we should get the wounded onto the vehicles and get moving.”

She was starting to like the way Rogers thought. “Oi, Dugan!” she shouted. “You and Falsworth get the worst hurt onto the truck and tank so we can get out of here.”

Dugan straightened his bowler hat as he looked up. “We’re on it.”

“Good.”  Daria ran her fingers through her hair. “Right now, we just need to make it to the meadow and settle in for some rest. We’ll figure out what we actually have when we get there.”

“Food’s gonna be a problem,” Rogers pointed out.

“Already started thinking along those lines. While they rest, I’m going to see if I can hunt anything. We’ll organize things like foraging in the morning, when we work out who’s going to watch our backs as we hike.”

“You’re going to- how are you planning on hunting?”

“I’m going to shapeshift, like I did earlier.”

He frowned. “How the hell did you _do_ that, anyway?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve seen some weird things, hell, I’ve _been_ through some weird things lately, but-“

She shrugged. “It’s a thing I can do,” she said. “And you and I are going to need to have a talk about the things I can do and the things you can do. Did Erskine ever tell you how that serum of his was developed?”

He started in surprise. “You knew Erskine?”

“A little. He developed the serum from a sample of my blood.”

Rogers went absolutely silent, gawking at her in stunned surprise. “From- you-“ he began. “But then… can you tell me more about it? The project?”

“What it probably actually did to you, how you can best make use of it, that sort of thing?”

He nodded. “I mean, I knew a little bit, and I’ve figured out some more, but…” he trailed off, still staring at her. A look of horror suddenly came over his face. “Schmidt…”

“Yeah.” Her lip curled slightly in a silent snarl. “He’s like us. Only a lot worse.”

“I’m not gonna be able to- to shapeshift too… am I?”

Now she regarded him thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It’s really a rather complicated business. I’ll explain it later. I’d like to get a chance to work with you if I can. Assuming Phillips doesn’t have you arrested the minute we get back to camp for going AWOL.”

She could see him flush, even in the very dim light of the stars and half-moon. “Yeah,” he said weakly. “Assuming he doesn’t…”

“You have absolutely no regrets about running off to rescue Barnes and everyone else, do you.”

He looked up at her. Though he was still rather red, a crooked smile tugged his lips. “Not a one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey look! Captain America has finally shown up in this Captain America fanfic!


	7. Arranged a Heart to Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Falsworth, okay?

_November, 1943_

_Austria, somewhere behind enemy lines_

                Dawn broke, spilling a thin greyish light through the foggy woods. Daria picked her way through the scrubby underbrush, making enough noise to warn the guards they had posted of her approach. It didn’t take very long before someone edged around a rather large tree with a rifle raised and aimed in her direction.

                “Who’s there?” he asked sharply.

                “It’s Noclaf.” She stepped a little further into view, one hand raised and one bracing a long branch over her shoulders. Several rabbits and quail hung from it, the results of her late-night hunting.

                The soldier’s eyes widen a little at the sight of her bounty and waved her into their rough ‘camp’. People were only just starting to wake up, though it was plain they were reluctant to move away from the meager warmth of the small, dying fires they had built.

                “Anyone here know what to do with these?” she called as she picked her way towards one of the fires.  Before she reached it, a soldier in a British infantry uniform came up and took her catch from her.

                “Oi can’ do much with just fires an’ no cookpot,” he said apologetically, in the broad accent Daria associated with the Devon area. “But Oi can dress a coney right enough.  Anyone that didn’t get rations last night will get some o’ this, seems most fair.”

                She nodded. “Do you know if Rogers ate last night?”

                He looked at her blankly. “Fraid I can’ say,” he said, giving a little shrug. “Oi think he got summat, but-“

                “Make sure he eats this morning, then.” Rogers was now probably metabolically similar to a real Tau’ka, which meant by now he would probably be starving. Giving the British soldier a grateful look, she went and dropped into an open spot next to the fire.

                Barnes started as she did, looking at her with wild eyes. She held her hands up as he snatched for his rifle, showing him they were empty.

                “Easy there, Barnes,” she said gently. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that.”

                She held very still, until sense began returning to the American’s expression.  He stared at her for a long moment, then blinked, shook his head and looked at her again. “Sorry.”

                His hold on the rifle didn’t loosen. “How do you know my name?” he asked.

                “Simple.” She nodded across the little fire. Rogers was curled up in a tight ball against the chill of the early morning. “Rogers mentioned the name, and he left the rest of us to go looking for you- or at least, you were the one he dragged out here personally and spent the first watch shift hovering over. And then you confirmed your name yourself. I’m Darian, if you missed my name going around. Darian Noclaf.”

                The entire time, she kept her voice low and soothing. Barnes was very jumpy right now, not that she could blame him at all. She just hope the carefully-explained logic would help soothe his nerves.

                “Oh,” he finally said. “Right. Yeah, I’m Barnes.” He looked over at Rogers as well, his mouth tight. “What the hell _happened_ to him? Last time I saw him, he was a skinny little punk you could punt clear across a football field.”

                “He didn’t tell you?”

                “We were a little busy. He just made some crack about joining the Army.”

                She considered this. “I only met him last night, but that sounds like something he’d say.”

                “Yeah.” He went quiet for a minute. Without seeming to notice, he rubbed at the inside of his elbow.

                “You okay?” she asked softly.”

                He immediately stopped, stiffening and giving her a dark look. “I’m fine. Just thinking, alright?”

                “Alright.” Her raised eyebrow plainly said it wasn’t, but she decided not to press while he was still so jumpy. “We’re going to get moving here soon. Are you up for the hike? You looked like you were in rough shape last night.”

                “I’m fine,” he repeated, more stubborn this time. Turning a little away from her, he went back to staring into the flames.

                _So much for conversation._ She stifled a yawn. Unlike the men, she’d gotten no sleep at all the night before. The food situation had been too dire for her to afford the time to rest. She’d been going for almost twenty-four hours straight now, and the exertion was wearing on her.  Her brain was starting to feel heavy and sluggish, not a good thing out here.

                Across the fire, Rogers stirred and slowly pushed himself up. “Bucky?” he asked, automatically searching for his friend. He spotted him, and relaxed. “Good.”

                “You didn’t think I’d disappear on you again, did you?” Barnes forced a smile, which got an answering one from Rogers.

                “Well, you were the one who wandered off in the first place. God, I can’t let you out of my sight for a minute without you disappearing.”

                “Just thought I’d try to go beat HYDRA all by myself.”

                “I told you, don’t go winning the war until I got here!”

                “You’re here, aren’t you?”

                Daria hid a smile, listening to the exchange.  There was no need to inquire; these two were definitely old friends and knew each other well. That kind of easy camaraderie and affectionate bickering only came after years of knowing someone.

                She suddenly missed Peggy with such intensity that for a moment it felt like a stab in the chest. She was tired, she was dirty, she was cold, she was hungry, her leg ached horribly and was protesting the way she had been walking on it all night, and all she wanted was to get back to camp and burrow against Peggy and sleep for a week.

                And then maybe explore the possibility of doing other, quite interesting things with Peggy after sleeping and eating and showering.

                All that would have to wait, sadly. The only way to get back to the camp faster was to abandon the train of freed prisoners. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t abandon them now. She would just stick it out right alongside them, so she could bring them all home safe.

                As the light grew stronger, those who had taken up the second shift of night watch began trickling back into the meadow to wake their fellows. Grumbles of distaste, muttered oaths about chilled bodies and stiff limbs, and groans of pain from the wounded created a buzz in the air.

                “Alright!” she heard Dugan shout. “Come on slackers, get your lazy asses out of bed so we can go home!”

                The grumbling increased rather significantly in response. Within a few minutes, though, men were getting to their feet, collecting what little they had in belongings and kicking dirt over the little fires to snuff them out.

                Rogers pushed himself to his feet and helped Barnes up- or rather, he offered. Barnes just shook his head and did his best to hide his unsteadiness as he got up. “Looks like we’re moving out.”

                “Sometimes I feel like all we do in the Army is march.”

                “I don’t think you’re wrong,” Daria said wryly, remembering the times she’d watched training maneuvers, both in England and back home. There tended to be a lot of running and marching involved.

                Barnes smiled weakly at that and followed Rogers up to the front of the line that was already forming. Since Daria knew where they were headed, she went as well. Dugan and Falsworth were already there, keeping watchful eyes on the proceedings.

                “Ah, just the two we were looking for,” Dugan said. “We’re about ready to get rolling, soon as the wounded get loaded up and that Cooper fellow figures out a way to keep some kind of little fire going on top of the tank.”

                Daria blinked. “Whatever for?” she asked blankly.

                “I think he means to cook what you brought in this morning.  Who’d’ve thunk it, making a campfire on top of a tank…”

                “If it means there’ll be something to eat later…” Rogers began.

                “That does appear to be the intention, yeah. And if he can’t rig it, well, we’ll just have to stop around midday like we were planning.” Dugan resettled the rifle he carried slung over his shoulder. “Morita’s gonna take some of the stronger fellows a little ways out from the column and see if they can scare up anything else while they watch our flanks.”

                “Maybe they’ll get lucky and find a farmstead or something…”

                “Maybe. Ain’t gonna count on it.”

                Daria nodded. “I only saw one while heading out this way,” she said. “It looked pretty abandoned. I doubt there’s anything left there.”

                “Think you could find it again?” Rogers asked. “Even if there isn’t food, there might be something useful…”

                She considered this for a moment. “Maybe,” she said at last. “It was a good ways out from where we are now…”

                “Which is where, exactly?”

                That prompted her to go fetch the maps from her pack. They, unlike her radio, had managed to avoid getting damaged. She spread them out on a fallen log for the others to see. “Here we are,” she said, running a finger along the line of a small river until she found the meadow they’d camped in.  She tapped the spot, then pointed to another a short distance away. “This is where the HYDRA factory is. Or was, I suppose, since according to Rogers, Schmidt set it rather merrily ablaze before abandoning it.”

                “We saw him,” Falsworth said, his expression grim. “He and that scientist fellow- the squinty little fellow with the glasses-“

                “Zola,” Bucky said quietly. “They called him Dr. Zola.”

                “Yes, him. They both came to look at us yesterday morning.”

                “Look at you?” Rogers frowned, puzzle. “For what-“

                His eyes fell on Barnes, who glanced away. Daria could see the muscles of his jaw tightening.

                An awkward silence fell, lingering until Barnes shook his head and leaned over the map once more. “So we’re here. Where’s the camp in relation to us?”

                She tapped another spot on the map. “It’s right up here.”

                Dugan stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “That’s at least three days,” he said. “Maybe a bit more. We’re not gonna move fast at all.”

                “Then we should get started.” Falsworth studied the maps closely, committing the carefully inked lines to memory. “That camp is ten miles back behind our lines, so until we get that far we’re still going to need to keep an eye out for German patrols.”

                They discussed that for a while. Morita and his group were already going to scout along their flanks, but they would already be busy watching for anything edible and trying to keep pace with their column.  Daria volunteered to do some more hunting and scouting as well- but only after she’d gotten some sleep. None of them begrudged her that, after what she’d done so far.

                It just frustrated her to have to slow down and rest. She knew as well as any of them that if she completely burned herself out now she’d be extremely vulnerable if they ran into trouble, but she still hated it. She was their most mobile and versatile asset, and right now she had to ground herself and let these tired, hungry, wounded men take care of things. This wasn’t such an emergency situation that she _had_ to keep going, so her pragmatic side insisted she take a rest while she could.

                At last they got moving. Morita led his group out into the forest after getting directions from Daria, fanning out ahead and to the sides of their column. The worst wounded were loaded onto the two vehicles, and the rest sorted themselves into some kind of marching order that suited themselves. They grouped themselves more or less by unit, forming little clusters of acquaintances and comrades. There were several, though, like Falsworth, who had no unit mates left, and so fitted themselves in wherever they could. Those who had gotten a share of last night’s rations now took the cigarettes and gum that had been with the food, to help them ignore hunger. Those who hadn’t gotten a share the night before would get at least a little of the meat Daria had brought in, or whatever Morita’s group managed to forage up. They would manage the best they could

                She did finally manage to get a nap, curling up on top of the truck in cat form. Cats could sleep anywhere, and she managed to make enough of a dip in the canvas cover over the bed of the truck to keep from feeling like she wasn’t just going to roll off.

                The column slowly moved across the landscape in a ragged line. There was very little talking amongst the men, for everyone was too busy straining their ears for any hint of German patrols to care to speak.  If someone collapsed from exhaustion, as several did, his companions would haul him up, drape his arms around their shoulders, and just keep moving.  They stopped once during the day, at noon, and the meat Cooper had managed to cook was doled out.

                She happened to be watching when Rogers gave Barnes his portion. The darker-haired American accepted it reluctantly, but when Rogers assured him that he’d eaten already he didn’t protest.

                Narrowing her eyes, she padded over to them. They’d picked a tree a little further apart from the others to lean against, which suited her fine.

                “Rogers,” she said briskly. “A word, if you don’t mind?”

                He started with a guilty expression, making Barnes frown. “What for?” he asked suspiciously.

                “I just need a word, Sergeant,” Daria replied.  Barnes’s frown deepened, but Rogers pushed himself away from the tree and followed her a little ways into the forest.  When they were out of human earshot, she turned to him, crossing her arms over her chest and eyeing him. He looked tired, with a little of that vaguely disconnected air of someone who hadn’t eaten in a fairly long time. “When did you eat last, Rogers?”

                She didn’t need the guilty look on his face to tell her that his response was an outright lie. “I got some of the rations they were splitting up last night,” he said. “I’m fine, really. Bucky needed the food more than me.”

                “You might think you’re ‘fine’ for now,” she said, “But you won’t be for long if you keep stinting yourself.  You’re burning through resources faster than you ever did before, and it won’t be long before you collapse if you don’t _eat_.”

                “And how do you know that-“

                “Because, you _idiot_ ,” she snapped. “Erskine’s whole ruddy project is based on _my_ blood, remember? _I’m_ what he was trying to recreate. He succeeded, which means you’re a lot more like me now than you are a normal human.”

                For a long moment, he stared at her, taking in what she just said. His eyes met hers, and she could see his mind putting pieces together, as swift as her own would, as he took in her distinctive labradorite irises.  The structure of Tau’ka eyes tended to give them a faceted, jewel-like appearance, due to protein structures within the eye itself that gave them a much finer degree of control over shape of the cornea and therefore much more accurate vision than those of a human. Whatever chemical and biological processes the supersoldier serum had triggered in Schmidt and Rogers had also altered their eyes. If Daria hadn’t known how both men had been altered, she would have thought them to be hybrids, with at least one Tau’ka ancestor fairly recently in their family line.

                It was a distinctive trait of her people, and a very obvious one. There was no way Rogers could have missed the change, looking at himself in the mirror.

                “Right,” he said at last. “So… what _are_ you, anyway?”

                She gestured him to a fallen log, digging the last of the fruit bars she’d brought with her from her pocket and tossing it to him. She’d donated most of the scant rations she’d had left to the common pile, along with Rogers’s, but she’d made sure to keep back one just in case she had no luck hunting. He caught it and unwrapped it, taking slow careful bites that he chewed thoroughly before swallowing.  “A lot of this falls under about eight different kinds of ‘classified’,” she said, sitting beside him. “And not just by the American and British governments. Frankly, I’m not supposed to be telling _anyone_ this.”

                He gave her a shrewd look. “How many people have you told?”

                “Only a few,” she said. “And only a couple of people have most of the picture. Peggy’s one of them. You’re going to be the other.” Henry had known, and Mina and Tom of the League, but outside of those three, only Peggy and Ana knew the entire truth. Everyone else just got pieces of it, accepting those pieces without ever guessing there was so much more to who and what she was.

                They just simply didn’t need to know. Rogers, though, he did need to know, because what had made her now made him.

                “Are you familiar with extraterrestrials?” she asked.

                “Extra- you mean, like _War of the Worlds?_ Creatures from space?”

                She nodded. “Not precisely like _War of the Worlds_ , but yes, that concept. The idea that out there in the far reaches of space, there are other worlds with life on them. Intelligent life. A long time ago- and it’s been thousands of years at this point- one of those intelligent races was at war with another, and hit upon the idea of modifying living beings to become the best warriors possible.”

                He raised his eyebrows a little. “That sounds like a familiar story,” he said wryly.

                “It really does, doesn’t it?” She gave him a crooked smile. “Well, they came here, and found humans. Humans, they realized, are a remarkable species. Very tough, very resilient, very intelligent, and very adaptable. They decided to take a group of humans and modify them to become _more_ than they already were.  Stronger, faster, longer-lived. More resilient to injury and disease. Even better at fighting in small units. Incredibly loyal. Willing to take orders but also innovative enough to be extremely adaptable in a fight. They succeeded in all of these modifications, and then they decided they wanted more.”

                “Like… shapeshifting?” he asked. “And that thing you were doing, that- that talking in my head thing?”

                She nodded. “Yes. All Tau’ka- that’s what we’re called, Tau’ka- have _powers_. Usually a couple. I shapeshift, I’m a fairly strong mindspeaker. But there’s dozens of other powers. I don’t know if you’ll show any of those. We can intermarry with humans, and if that goes on for a few generations without breeding back to a Tau’ka line, the powers tend to be the first big traits that disappear, before things like the strength and longevity.  That might be what happens with you, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about what Erskine actually _did_ to be able to guess if you’ll show powers, or if you’re more like a hybrid.”

                “Oh…” He looked away for a moment, taking this in. “So when Schmidt talked about becoming a ‘superior man’…”

                “If you really want to get into a disgusting way of thinking, he kind of did.” She grimaced. “We were literally bred to be better warriors than humans. There are some Tau’ka who think that means we were bred to be _better_ than humans all the way around, and that therefore we are. There are a few who’ve taken that idea to some ugly extremes. I don’t hold with any of that nonsense, and I never have.  Just because I’m faster and stronger than a human doesn’t mean I’m _better_ than one, it just means I’m better at doing certain things.”

                To her surprise, he looked a little relieved.

                _Did he fear I was like Schmidt?_ she wondered. _Did he think I believed I was better than a human because I was of a race literally bred to be that way?_

                Well, it was a legitimate fear, she supposed. Especially with the way Schmidt and Hitler and those who supported them thought. How awful would it have been, to learn you had been altered to be more like someone who believed that? Especially when, according to Peggy, Rogers cared so deeply about other people- when he’d demonstrated that heart and loyalty by defying orders and coming all the way out here to rescue hundreds of people from the clutches of people who thought that way?

                No wonder he was relieved.

                “So… what happened with your people?” he asked. “Do you still… work for…”

                “The Creators?” She shook her head. “No. We got rid of them a long time ago. There’s quite a lot of us now. For the most part, we live on one of five different worlds we’ve colonized.”

                “You’ve colonized _worlds?_ ”

                “Five of them, yes. We’re technologically advanced enough to maintain things like communications and travel between them. The colony I’m from is called Verris.”

                He gaped at her openly. “You’ve traveled between different planets…  God, that’s amazing. I wish Bucky were hearing this… he’d be amazed. He loves science. The day before he shipped out, he took me on a double-date with a couple of girls to the big science expo Stark was putting on.” He smiled. “Then dancing, of course. But Bucky really wanted to visit the expo while he had a chance, so that’s where we went. The girls mostly ignored me… That’s how it usually went in those days.”

                “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “It must’ve been hard.”

                “Well, Bucky was always a lot better with women then me.” He mustered up a wry smile. “So, if you’re from another planet, what are you doing _here_?”

                “I was assigned here,” she told him. “I _am_ an intelligence operative. There’s a few of us working here on Earth. Mostly we keep an eye on things and try to prevent things like massive wars breaking out. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don’t. There’s just so few of us it’s hard to do, and then we generally have to figure out how to clean things up without taking sides. I was sent here back in ’99. A couple of rogue Tau’ka of the more… radical sort decided it was time to really prove who was the superior race after all and joined up with a fellow who wanted to trigger a world war so he could profit by selling arms to both sides.”

                Rogers’s look of disgust and horror was more than enough to tell her his feelings on the matter. “That’s _horrible_.”

                “And exactly why my superiors wanted to put a stop to it. Well, I did, along with a group of other people- humans- with odd abilities. We got together, we stopped the bad guys, and… I stayed.”

                “Why’d you stay? I mean, for a guy who’s been on other worlds, flown between the stars… why stay here?”

                She looked up at him, holding his gaze. “I came to love this world and its people. Granted, sometimes it’s challenging to do so. Sometimes I wonder why I’m still here when I know that I could be reassigned anywhere I wanted if I just asked.  But there are people here worthy of loving. Of caring for, protecting, helping. I stay for them, to stop other people from hurting them, so they can go on with their lives and make great and beautiful things and be happy.”

                _I stayed for love- for these people. For the League. For Henry, damaged and struggling with the consequences of his own pride and inner demons. For my daughter, who is half of this world and only half of my own. For brave and wonderful women like Peggy, and for children who grow up only wanting to do something to make the world a better place, to make protectors, like Abraham Erskine. I stayed to help protect this world from the Schmidts and the Hitlers and the Moriartys and the foolish old men who needlessly waste the lives of their country’s men and spill their blood in stupid, stupid ways because they’re too pigheaded to change. I stayed to protect you from people like my brothers, who see you as being nothing of value.  I stayed hoping to find people like you, Steve Rogers, who care so much that they walk alone into enemy territory to save hundreds of people and their best friend. I stayed because this world needed me, someone who could fight what its own people might not be able to, someone who would fight for them because they needed it. I stayed because it was right._

                Rogers watched her for a long moment. Then, slowly, he smiled.  “Okay,” he said quietly.  “You know, a lot of guys wouldn’t ever say they’re fighting for love.  Sure, they’d talk about honor and patriotism and all, but that never seems like the _right_ reason to be fighting. Honor seems to be more about ego, and patriotism…” He sighed a little and glanced away. “Well, sometimes it’s good, but it only works if what you’re feeling that patriotism _for_ is supporting the right thing.”

                Having listened to Ana seething about every new poisonous recipe concocted by American government scientists to add to alcohol during the Prohibition years, Daria couldn’t blame him for having reservations. He looked to be of an age where that had been a large part of the background radiation of his life.

                “So why are you out here, trying to fight?” she asked. “Why sign up for a risky and untested process to literally remake yourself so you could go out there and fight?”

                Steve Rogers looked her dead in the eye. “I don’t like bullies,” he said simply. “I never have. I don’t want to _have_ to fight. But there’s people out here who will hurt others just because they want to, because they think they’re better than the people they’re hurting or because it just serves some agenda of theirs. I hate that. I don’t think that’s what we should be doing to each other as people. I’ve spent my whole life getting kicked around by people bigger and stronger than me. Now I have a chance to stop some of the worst bullies around. I can’t just sit around and let that go to waste.”

                “You’re right,” she said. Under all of that fierce determination, she sensed there was another layer, a stubborn desire to prove he was just as good as anyone else no matter what the cost to himself. Peggy had a similar stubborn streak to her- it was a part of why Daria loved her so much.

                It would be very easy to fall for this man too.

                _He really ought to be doing more than touring with a song-and-dance troupe_ , she thought grimly. _He’s wasted there, and I’ll bet he’s being used by some preening politician with an agenda and a plan to use him on his next platform._

                She offered her hand, and he took it, returning her handshake with a firm grip. “I think we understand each other a little better now,” she said. “Thank you.”

                “Thank _you_ ,” he said. “I- I think I feel a little better about all of this now. And I guess it’s good to know if I start doing anything weird-“

                “It’s all my fault?” She grinned.

                “Exactly.” He got to his feet, helping her to her own as her injured leg complained. “And thanks for the food.”

                Reminded of the reason why she’d dragged him out here in the first place, she elbowed him sharply in the ribs. “Yes. Now stop giving your rations to other people, dammit.  You and I just flat-out need more food than they do, and we’re going to feel a lack of it first. I don’t feel like dragging your fainting arse back to camp and explaining _that_ to Phillips too. I’m going to hunt again tonight, and whatever I bring back you damn well better have a piece of.”

                “Yes sir,” he said meekly, ducking his head a little and looking up at her.

                “Damn right yes sir.” She had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Was he making that contrite-puppy face on purpose or was that just his usual expression for such an exchange? She hadn’t the faintest idea.

                _Bloody hell, that’s adorable though. Why is he adorable on top of everything else?_

                Still, she pretended to maintain a grumpy front until he laughed. At that point, she couldn’t restrain herself.

                Barnes eyed them- mostly her more than Rogers- as they returned to the group. They were getting ready to move out again, weary men staggering to their feet to march a few more miles over the rough terrain. “Steve?” he asked quietly.

                “I’m fine, Buck,” he replied. “Come on. Let’s not let them leave without us.”

                Morita’s scouts found the Germans a couple of hours before sunset. Daria and Rogers heard the rattling of machine gun fire first, turning towards the sound almost as one.

                “Dugan!” Rogers shouted. “They’re on our left flank! Keep the column moving and get everyone the hell out of here!”

                “You heard the Captain, boys!” Daria wondered if Dugan had ever been a drill sergeant. He certainly had the knack of making his voice boom and carry over a wide area without actually shouting himself hoarse. “Let’s pick up the pace!”

                She and Rogers broke into a lope towards the sound of combat. To her surprise, Barnes and Falsworth also broke off from the column to follow.

                “You didn’t think we’d let you go alone, did you?” Falsworth asked as Daria and Steve slowed their pace a little to let them catch up. Barnes nodded grimly, keeping his rifle steady even over the rough ground.

                “Guess not!” Rogers replied.

                They found the fight in a gully a few hundred yards from the column. Morita and two of his scouts were pinned down at the bottom, taking cover behind some broken logs and rocks. At the top of the hill, a German patrol, a full squad of ten men, were taking potshots down at them. Daria bristled at the sight- they weren’t even _trying_. Instead, they lazily ducked out of sight any time Morita or his companions popped up to take a shot at them, and their return fire had the same lazy arrogance about it, as if they didn’t care about wasting a few bullets, the sheer fact that they outnumbered the American soldiers more than three to one was more than enough to assure them an easy victory.

                No sooner did the Germans come into view than Barnes stopped where he stood, raised his rifle to line up a shot, and gently squeezed the trigger. The soldier who’d ducked out to take a shot at Morita dropped like a stone.

                For a moment there was absolute silence.  The rest of the German squad stared down at their comrade, as if they couldn’t quite figure out why he was dead.

                Then all hell broke loose.  Half the Germans whirled on the newcomers, the rest began spraying the gully with gunfire. One of Morita’s companion dropped with a cry of fear and pain, the front of his rough green sweater turning dark with blood.

                Rogers sprinted up the hill. At some point he’d snatched his battered shield off his back and set it on his arm. Now he charged into the knot of German soldiers, ducking his head behind the shield and crashing right through them, scattering them like ninepins.

                “Yanks,” she heard Falsworth mutter. “Always rushing into things.”

                Daria darted ahead, looping around to flank the scattered Germans and hit them from the side.

                “Oh not you too, Noclaf!”

                The gunfire mostly ceased as Daria and Rogers waded into the group of Germans, breaking them into smaller groups and driving them away from one another. She heard Barnes’s rifle bark once, twice more, each time dropping a soldier who’d gotten separated from the group. Ducking under the wild swing of one soldier, Daria kicked him hard in the gut. He fell, tumbling down the hill to the bottom of the gully and out of her immediate line of vision. Beside her, Rogers was putting his shield to good use. His enemies stood no chance against the powerful blows.

                It was all over in a few minutes. Suddenly met by much more equal odds and a pair of superhumans who just charged right in to close range, the Germans didn’t last long at all. Daria knelt next to one, stripping the jacket from the body and wiping her bloodied sword clean on the man’s shirt. It might be rather morbid, but at this point a jacket was a jacket and the cold was getting to her.

                “Why did I come again?” Falsworth asked as he joined them, his fair face flushed. “It seems you three had things well in hand.

                “Looks like we did.” Rogers was breathing a little hard, resting his shield on the ground and leaning against. “Where do you think they came from?”

                She shrugged. “Probably nearby though,” she said. “They’re not carrying much in the way of supplies. These aren’t even overnight packs. Maybe from one of those outposts near the border? I thought we were a bit further behind their lines than that, though…”

                “Can you check?”

                Nodding, she pushed to her feet- and swayed, nearly collapsing as her leg tried to fold up under her. Falsworth caught her, keeping her from falling to the ground. “ Noclaf,” he said worriedly. “Your leg.”

                She looked down and grimaced. The shrapnel wounds had broken open and were bleeding again, staining the leg of her fatigue pants afresh. “Oh,” she said. “Damn. Forgot about that.”

                “Will you just sit down and let me bandage them this time?” he demanded. He didn’t give her a choice in sitting down, instead just giving her a little shove in the general direction of ‘down’ until her rump met the ground.  Rogers handed him a first aid kit he’d found on one of the Germans and he set to work, digging out bandages and a half-used tube of antiseptic ointment. The ointment stung, making her flinch instinctively as he dabbed it into the oozing gouges. “These are deeper than I thought,” he said, frowning. He carefully prodded at one of the wounds. She hissed in pain. While her immune system would keep the wounds from going septic, they were still very painful and a little swollen. “And I might have missed a few bits.”

                “Just clean them. We’ll take the rest of that kit back to the column.” She looked over as she pulled on the jacket. Barnes was standing off to the side, his face pale and mouth tight, not seeming to really register what Rogers was saying to him in a soft voice. When Rogers touched his arm, he flinched away.

                Morita joined them. He was covered with mud, and his expression was grim. In his free hand he held two sets of dog tags. “Everyone up here okay?” he asked.

                “Noclaf appears to have a complete disregard for his own skin, but other than that I think we’re all right.” Falsworth also cast a quick glance at Barnes and frowned, but he didn’t make a comment. Any English native growing up after the Great War would recognize the signs of shellshock when they saw it. “Your scouts?”

                Morita shook his head. “Damn Germans got them both,” he said. He looked furious with himself. “If I’d been paying more attention we might not have run right into them. Fucking waste.”

                All Daria and Falsworth could do was give him sympathetic looks. She felt ill, wondering if they could have saved those two men if they’d been just a little faster.

                _Don’t do that to yourself_ , she told herself sternly. _Don’t get yourself tied up in what ifs. That way lies madness and lethal second-guessing. We didn’t make it. We’ve got hundreds of others we need to get home safe._

                Still, it hurt, knowing that they’d lost two men that maybe they hadn’t had to lose.

“There,” Falsworth said, tying off the bandages he’d wrapped around her calf. “All done.” He helped her to her feet, draping one of her arms around his shoulders so she could lean against him and keep some weight off her leg. She gave him a bit of a scowl, but obeyed. Might as well accept the help while she had the chance and rest her leg a little. She still needed to be ambulatory later, after all, if she was going to hunt for the men. “You coming, Rogers?”

                Rogers stood at the top of the rise, staring down into the gully at the bodies they were leaving behind with a grim expression. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I’m coming.”

                Barnes gently tugged his sleeve, and he reluctantly turned away to follow them.


	8. Oh Look, a Distratcion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which things go boom.

_November 1943_

_The Austrian-Italian border_

 

                Two evenings later, Daria, Rogers, Dugan, and a few of the others crept on ahead from where the main body of their column was camped to join Morita and Jones. Their scouts had found the German border camp late in the afternoon and come back to warn them. Now, just before dusk, they surveyed the small base, each wearing frowns as they counted men and the big mounted guns meant to take out anything flying overhead. Daria was glad they’d gotten their people and vehicles tucked well back away from the little road they’d been following for the past day. The Germans were patrolling the area in groups, and they were well-armed.

                “HYDRA used to run supply caravans through this area,” Barnes said quietly. “We knew they were transporting things through here, but we didn’t know where they were going. This is the edge of their front lines. We took most of the ground through here about a month before the last time we tangled with them. Couldn’t get any further without more troops- they had us stopped right here.”

                “We were waiting on reinforcements so we could come make a push through this camp,” Dugan added. “ ‘Course, HYDRA had other ideas than waiting around until we were ready to come stomp all over them.”

                “How very rude of them,” Falsworth said, his voice very dry.

 Daria hid a smile and scooted up a little further beside Morita, trying to get a better view of the nearest gun emplacement. “How many do you reckon are in there?”

“A base this size?” He frowned, considering. “Could be up to five hundred in there. Maybe more, depending on how they decided to beef up their forces here. I counted five tanks in there before Jones and I came to fetch you guys.

Dugan whistled. “That’s a lotta firepower. They really don’t want us pushing any further in here, do they?”

“Well, HYDRA _did_ have that factory tucked back in the hills,” Jones pointed out. “They probably didn’t want you guys getting anywhere near it.”

“Well it’s a bit late for that now, ain’t it?”

Rogers frowned. “Do you think any of the survivors from the factory made it this far?” he asked. “They might have warned these guys that we escaped. This is the straightest route to the border from the factory, so it makes sense we’d come through right here.”

“Which means they’ll be looking for us.” The big ginger man cracked his knuckles. “They won’t get us without a fight.”

She sighed and shook her head. “No, they won’t,” she said. “But getting past them is more important than fighting them. It’s the tank and the truck I’m worried about. We can sneak the men past in the forest as long as we’re careful, but the wounded on the vehicles can’t walk. We _have_ to get those through on the road. Half a mile past here the forest opens up and we have mostly clear territory until we get back to the camp. Once we’re that far, we should be fine, we’ll be back in Allied territory. Phillips will have patrols doing sweeps. If we’re lucky, we’ll run into one of them and have a bit of an escort the rest of the way.”

“It’s just getting out of the trees that’s the trick.”

“Can we create some kind of distraction?” Rogers asked. “Something that will draw their attention away from the road?”

Jones had spent the last few minutes translating things for the sole Frenchman they’d rescued from the factory. Jacques Dernier, he’d told them, had been with the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France before HYDRA had snatched him and sent him to the factory. Now, he grumbled in French too fast for Daria to follow well, making large sweeping gestures with his hands.

“He says it’s a pity we don’t have any grenades left,” Jones translated as Dernier mimed an explosion. “A few of those are always good for making a distraction.”

“Hmm…” She frowned and returned to studying the camp. “You know… he might have something there.”

“What do you mean?” Falsworth asked.

“I mean, chances are good that there’s some grenades down there that could be requisitioned for distraction-making purposes.”

All seven men turned to look at her. “You mean, sneak down there and grab a few?” Dugan asked. “Just walk right in there and walk right back out again?”

“I walked right into HYDRA’s factory to rescue you lot,” she pointed out. “So did Rogers. Though I think in this case it would be better if we just had one person going in.”

Dugan turned to Falsworth. “Are all you Brits crazy?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m pretty sure that’s just him.”

“You sure about that?”

“Mostly.”

“Oi,” she protested.

“He’s got a point though,” Barnes put in. “One person could sneak in there and make out with enough grenades for Dernier to draw the soldiers away. We can get the men who can walk moving first and have them across the border before we light things up. Then, once the road’s cleared, we get the tank and the truck across and book it for our own lines.”

They all exchanged looks, mulling this over. The benefit of that plan was, if they could sneak the men through the forest successfully, that would be more than nine-tenths of their group already past this fortification before anyone was the wiser.

It was just that the last tenth of their group was the tenth that was the most vulnerable. The men in the vehicles were too injured- or ill, at this point- to run or fight on their own behalf. They would be completely dependent on the drivers and the small armed force of ambulatory ex-prisoners left to escort them for protection.

“I don’t see a better alternative,” Rogers said at last. “Do any of you?” When the others shook their heads, he nodded and started to get to his feet. “Then go back and get the men moving. Soon as it gets dark, I’ll sneak in there and see about making off with some grenades. Dernier will wait on the opposite side of the camp and set them off.”

“Like hell you are, Steve!” Barnes protested, glaring at him. “Bad enough you snuck into the factory-“

“Bucky, I can do this.”

“You’re not trained for something like this!”

Daria exchanged glances with the others as Rogers and Barnes continued to argue, their voices starting to get louder. It was Morita who stepped in. “Would you both _shut up?_ ” he demanded. “Or do you want to warn them were here?”

The two Americans quickly fell silent, glancing down the hill to see if they had been noticed. When a few minutes passed and no Germans raised an alarm, they slowly relaxed.

“I’ll go,” Daria said firmly, glaring at both Rogers and Barnes. “I can get in and out without being seen. Dugan, you drive the tank. Falsworth, I want you on the gun, you were pretty handy with it getting out of the factory. Jones, stay with Dernier and stand watch for him. Morita, you’re on point. Get the column over the border and back on our side. Be careful when you get close, they might have mines set up by now. Barnes, you and Rogers stay with the vehicles and act as cover for them. I’ll join you as soon as I get the grenades to Dernier. As soon as it gets dark, Morita, start moving the column. You can have two hours, then I’m going in. No more than an hour or two after that, and Dernier will light things up like it’s Guy Fawkes day.”

That suited everyone but Rogers and Barnes. The others nodded agreement, casting quick looks down at the German encampment before getting up to go find their positions. The two Americans, however, stayed behind to protest.

She glared at them both again.

“You’re still hurt,” Rogers said before she could order them to get moving. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go in there alone.”

“I’m not going on foot, you ninny,” she growled. “I’m going to fly in.”

“Fly?” Barnes just stared at her as if she were insane. “The hell do you mean, ‘fly’?”

“I mean I’m going to turn into an owl and fly in there when it gets dark and steal some grenades is what I mean.”

He continued to stare at her for a moment, then shook his head. “You’re either delusional or insane.”

She held his gaze. Then , in a breath, she switched shapes, becoming an eagle-owl. Barnes yelped, immediately grabbing for his rifle.

“Bucky!” Rogers snatched his friend’s hands away before he could reach the trigger. “Bucky, it’s okay!” He looked down at her. “That wasn’t very nice, you know.”

She ruffled her feathers once, then resumed her own shape. “Yes, well,” she said. “We’re on a bit if a tight schedule here, and we need grenades.”

“You’re still hurt.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“Fucking hell,” Barnes muttered, eyes wide. “How the hell did you do that?”

“It’s just a thing he does,” Rogers said. “He’s weird. But it works, it’s real.” He tugged off one glove and showed Barnes a couple of healing scratches on his wrist. “He gave me those by accident back at the factory while he was an owl.”

“This is crazy… this is absolutely crazy.” Barnes shook his head. “And you’re just going with this, Steve?”

“Well… kinda? I mean it’s weird, but… well.” He gestured to himself, giving his friend a sheepish look. “I mean, this happened, so… why not a shapeshifter, right?”

Barnes turned back to her. “Was it freaky science?” he asked. “Did you sign up for a government science experiment too?”

“Something along those lines.” In a roundabout sort of way. Sort of.

He shook his head. “Damn. And I thought this supersoldier thing was nuts. This is _really_ nuts. Really fucking nuts.”

“You’ve made that point abundantly clear.”

“Guess so.” He had the look of a man who really, really didn’t want to know any more than that. “Right… Damn. Okay. I’m okay.” He took a deep breath and nodded.

“I still don’t like the idea of you going in alone,” Rogers said. “I can help-“

She scowled at him, exhaling sharply through her nose. “Fine,” she said. “You can come. We get in, we grab the grenades, and maybe see about some sabotage in there. Maybe we can damage a few of their tanks or something.”

He brightened and nodded. “Anything to keep them from chasing us will be good.”

“If you guys are gonna go have a party, then you’ll be better for some cover.” Barnes set his jaw grimly, looking at her as if daring her to argue. “I’ve got a pretty good view of the camp from here, and an even better one if I push in closer. I’ll watch, and if it looks like anyone’s getting in close I’ll lure them away.”

 _Bloody hell. What did I get myself into?_ She sighed, trying not to sound too exasperated. This was what she got for trying to take something resembling command of a bunch of military boys. And American ones to boot. She was British Intelligence, strictly speaking she didn’t have rank or authority over them. She was only running things as much as she was because she’d engineered the rescue, and that was as much Rogers’ doing as her own. Without a clear superior to take orders from, these soldiers were feeling free to make more of their own field decisions than usual- and were speaking up with objections they wouldn’t raise to a superior officer. A lot like a Tau’ka pack, actually. Her people tended to fight in small units of less than a dozen warriors, following a leader and a second-in-command. They formed intense bonds and loyalties between members of their group, or pack, which could make it difficult for an outsider to establish authority. The pack leader was the voice of the group, strengthening and clarifying what his or her followers needed from the world and acting in their best interest in return, leading and caring for them all. In that sense, they were rather like the patriarch or matriarch of a wolf pack- part leader, part friend, part parent figure. There was no word in English that really carried the full meaning of the Tau’ka term, simply because humans didn’t really have that concept of a group that was half family and half field team. Tau’ka translators had simply done the best they could, adopting the term for a family unit of wolves since the familial nature of wolf packs covered the idea a little better than anything else they could come up with.

Like human soldiers, however, a Tau’ka pack could be assigned a new leader if one didn’t arise naturally from within the group.  It wasn’t unusual for a portion of the pack to resist the orders of a new leader at first, though they rarely did so in a crisis situation. In part, it was because packs were as much units of family and friends as they were military units. A leader would need to win the _friendship_ as well as the loyalty of their allies in order to be successful- and they couldn’t just blindly give orders as a result. They had to care for their packmates, above all.

Even after forty years among them, some of how human soldiers operated still baffled her. She’d seen cruel and unkind commanders who wasted their mens’ lives without much care, or those who drove their soldiers until they dropped. A Tau’ka pack would never permit such treatment- any leader like that would soon be driven out of the group and punished by their laws. More importantly, no good Tau’ka leader would treat his or her pack that way.

  “Fine,” she said. “Fine. I’ll sneak in with Rogers. You watch our backs, Barnes.”

They both nodded, to her intense relief. Part of her quandary about being an outsider to these men, from a different country and branch, could be solved in time. If they were going to work together for an extended period, she could start befriending them and personally winning their loyalty. In this situation, though, when their only goal was to get home where they would surely disperse back to their own groups, there was no real opportunity to do that. Or, she supposed, no real need for it. Being flexible on some things and just giving reasonable orders ought to serve until they all got home again.

_Well, they do say to never give orders you know won’t be obeyed anyway._

Apparently ordering Rogers to stay away from the front lines and Barnes to not be on hand to help him fell into that category.

“Barnes, go catch up with the others and let them know about the change in plans,” she ordered. “Have Morita pick out some reasonably healthy men to protect the vehicles. That group will cover the vehicles until they’re past the danger line, then melt into the forest once they’re clear and rejoin the rest of the group when they can. You’re something of a sniper, right?”

He nodded briskly, for the first time since she’d met him a little light coming into his eyes. It was a grim little light- his pride in such a skill had to be dark, for what decent man could really hold an unalloyed pride in the ability to kill?- but it was more lively than she’d seen in him outside of glimpses of him ribbing Rogers. “I’m a damn good shot. I’ll find a perch and set up as best I can.” He patted the rifle. “This isn’t exactly designed for sharpshooting, but I’ve got it figured out now. I’ll get clean shots.”

“Perfect. Get going. It isn’t long before the column will need to get moving.”

He loped off- slowly, but with an intent purpose, and Daria moved a little ways along the side of the hill until she found a pine with branches that drooped until they brushed the ground, forming a little pocket behind a screen of needles and twigs. She ducked inside, Rogers joining her.

“Sorry about Bucky,” he said quietly. “He’s always been protective of me. He was always the one who came and fished me out of trouble, when I was short and skinny and jumped into things over my head.”

She smiled wryly. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone needs mates like that.”

“Me more than most, I guess.” He smiled crookedly. “I really didn’t know when to quit.”

“You say that like you know when to quit now. Somehow I have a hard time believing that.”

He burst out laughing, and she grinned. “Okay, I see what you mean.”

“You are the man who convinced Peggy Carter to airlift him thirty miles behind enemy lines so you could jump out of an aeroplane to go rescue your best friend.”

“Hey! In my defense, I was just planning on stealing a truck. The plane was her idea.”

She considered this for a moment. “Okay point. That’s a very Peggy thing to do.”

He leaned back, grimaced, and tugged the shield off his back and set it aside before leaning against the trunk of the tree once more. “How’d you meet her, anyway?” he asked. “You seem like you know her pretty well, and she talked about you once or twice, while I was in Basic.”

“I do know her pretty well,” she said. She drew her good leg up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her knee and leaving her other leg stretched out before her.  “We’ve worked together on and off for about five years now.” She smiled a little at the memory. “I was in Paris. I was passing through after a mission and I got pinned down in an old warehouse by a Nazi patrol. It was getting a bit ugly- I got clumsy and they saw me shapeshift, so I knew they were going to shoot the hell out of any animals they spotted. Well, I spent an hour or two playing keep-away with them. Took a hit in the middle of it, which didn’t help, nasty little arm shot. They’re closing in, and the next thing I know, bam, two of the Nazis are down. Some of the most beautifully clean shots I’ve ever seen with a little handgun. They drop, I make a dash across to the next bit of cover while I’ve got some breathing room, and as I go I see this woman just beating the hell out of a third soldier with this briefcase she’s carrying. One swing to the gut, next to the chin, and he drops like a stone. She spots me and tells me to follow her, so I do. She mentioned one of the code phrases MI6 uses for its agents to identify themselves to others in the field, so I knew she was legit. Anyway, I  went with her, we fought our way out past what’s left of the patrol, and we made a run for the coast.”

Daria wasn’t certain when the last time she’d seen someone looking so absolutely starstruck. Rogers’s eyes were huge and round with wonder and awe. As far as Daria was concerned, that was exactly the expression one ought to be wearing when hearing stories about Agent Margaret Carter. “Wow,” he breathed. “What was she doing in Paris?”

“Meeting with another agent,” she said. “MI6 has a couple of people in France helping with the resistance. Peggy was carrying orders for them they didn’t want to trust to telegrams.” Some of those people, Daria was vaguely aware of, had previously been working to organize the Home Guard Auxiliary Units in the British countryside. Since Germany seemed to have decided against the notion of attempting an all-out invasion of Britain- for the moment, at least- some of those agents had been shuffled from teaching English country folk the deadly art of covert operations and organized sabotage to doing the same with the French. “I didn’t know about that until a bit later. At the time, all either of us cared about was that we were both English operatives and we both wanted to get the hell out of France as soon as possible. Later on, though, we realized we worked well together. She started asking to work with me specifically just before I got her and Erskine out of Germany. We’ve been working together off and on ever since.”

He listened with rapt fascination. “She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?” he asked.

She nodded, and to her surprise she had to squash down a little flicker of jealousy. Rogers sounded like he was more than a little infatuated with Peggy. Well, not that she could blame him in the slightest, Peggy was well worth being infatuated with.

Still. Peggy was with _her_ , and it was hard not to feel a bit uneasy at the look in Rogers’s eyes.

 _If Peggy decides to choose him over me, that’s her decision,_ she reminded herself firmly, though her stomach knotted in distress at the notion. _No matter how much it hurts. Besides, you don’t even know if Peggy would return his obvious interest. Don’t go blowing things up just because Captain Handsome Puppy-Eyes here happens to agree with you in thinking that Peggy Carter is one of the most amazing women to ever grace this planet. Because that’s ridiculous. Jealousy is a poisonous thing._

“She is amazing,” she said firmly. “And any man who thinks about trying to woo her ought to be aware of that, and treat her like the brilliant and capable human being that she is.”

Something about her tone must have had a more dangerous edge in it than she’d planned, because he looked at her in surprise and dismay, his cheeks flushing. “Oh- Oh God, I’m sorry- you- are you two…?”

_Bloody hell, he’s sharp, isn’t he?_

“We’ve had a bit of a thing,” she said carefully. “Off and on. But she’s free to choose anyone she likes, whether that person is me or someone else. This whole bloody awful war makes it hard to make any kind of real commitment, when you don’t know if one of you is going to go off to some desolate bombed-out corner of Europe and never come back again. And that’s not even getting into the whole fraternization thing, and what her superiors would say if they ever learned she was getting into a relationship with another agent.” _Especially me- the alien. The alien woman to boot. Even if people here don’t generally grasp the notion that two women might have carnal interests in each other. Which is strange and bizarre but there you go. Humans are odd creatures who generally don’t make a great deal of sense in groups._ “That could blow up and be very, very unpleasant for her, so what we have had together, we’ve kept quiet. If she decides we need to break things off to avoid having MI6 come down on her, then that’s what we’ll do. I follow her lead.”

Which, honestly, she did. It was Peggy who’d made the first move between them, Peggy who’d looked at her one night while they were hiding in an old building of abandoned flats while the rain poured down outside and thunder boomed and asked to kiss her. Daria had been waiting for it, wanting it, since she’d first realized Peggy was looking at her that way, but it was Peggy who’d made the first move. Daria hadn’t wanted to push, not when she knew how people generally thought about relationships between people of the same sex. She’d given her little signals, hinting that she would welcome such interest, but it was Peggy who’d made the move, Peggy who’d drawn her close and pressed her lips to hers, her usual blunt directness a veneer over an almost shy uncertainty that Daria had done her best to banish.

They’d laughed afterwards, when one kiss had become many and they realized just how much of Peggy’s bright red lipstick had gotten smeared onto Daria’s face. And elsewhere.

All _kinds_ of interesting elsewheres.

The disappointment was plain to see on Rogers’ face. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry- I don’t want to intrude-“

“Leave that for Peggy to decide, alright?” she said. “I care about her. A lot. But Peggy decides what she wants, not me. Although…” She narrowed her eyes, looking straight at Rogers. “Anybody she picks better treat her right. Because anyone who doesn’t is going to be in a world of pain- and that’s only if _she_ leaves him alive. Do we understand each other?”

Rogers swallowed nervously and nodded. “Yessir,” he said weakly.

“Good.”

She softened then, and gave him a little smile. “She could do a lot worse than either of us,” she said. “Now come on, enough chit-chat. Let’s be ready to move.”

They were ready, when the time came. They flew in- or rather, Daria carried him more or less to the middle of the camp in gryphon shape, dodging the big searchlights, and then let him jump down to the tops of one of the rough buildings that had been erected while she found a perch elsewhere. There they split up, each of them looking for an armory.

She found it first and silently called to Rogers to join her. Together they found a patch of shadow, watching the guard on duty at the door.

“Do we take him out?” Rogers whispered. “What if someone notices he’s not there?”

< _No choice,_ > she replied. < _I circled this building before calling you. There’s no windows, and while I could claw my way in through the roof, that would be noisy._ >

He sighed with distaste, but nodded. “Maybe we could knock him out?” he suggested.

She considered this. Killing the man would be the quickest and surest way of making sure he didn’t raise an alarm, but she could hardly fault Rogers for wanting to avoid killing if possible.  They didn’t _need_ to kill him, she supposed. And not all German soldiers were as fanatical as their leaders.

Well, HYDRA seemed to be, to a man, but the rank-and-file of the rest of the German forces? Many of them were just men, who might have very little choice about having to take up a weapon. Certainly more than half of the British forces didn’t actually want to be soldiers. This fellow wasn’t wearing a HYDRA uniform. He could, for all they knew, just be some poor who’d been forced into this.

At last, she nodded. < _Go ahead and try it, if you can do it quietly,_ > she said.

He unslung the shield from his back and settled it on his arm. At his nod, she gave a handful of pebbles a few yards away a mental shove. They skittered and clattered over one another, drawing the guard’s attention. While the man was distracted, Rogers darted in and struck him over the head with the shield. He caught him as he fell, and shoved him out of sight in the shadows behind a pile of metal drums.

Daria forced the lock open as she had the one on Zola’s office, and they ducked inside before anyone could see. They had indeed found the armory, and it wasn’t long before they found several crates of grenades.

“Dernier’s gonna have fun with these,” Rogers muttered as he shoved some into his pockets. Daria did the same, smiling wryly.  They only needed a few minutes to do so, and they were slipping back out of the armory and making their way towards the fence on the German side of the camp, where it was darker and fewer people were moving about. Barnes had set himself up overlooking the northeast corner, to give them cover.

They drew up alongside a last building. Daria heard the crunch of gravel under boots that weren’t there a half-second before Rogers did and yanked him back before he could round the corner. He flailed a little, and the shield he’d been carrying slipped from his hold to hit the ground with a metallic _clang_.

“ _Wer ist da?_ ” a brusque voice demanded. “ _Kommen Sie da raus!”_

Rogers hastily snatched up the shield and ducked into the shadows, but it was too late. The footsteps were coming closer. Any moment now the German would find them and sound the alarm.

There was a single sharp crack of gunfire, slightly muffled by distance, and the sound of a man hitting the ground as the German uttered a sharp cry of pain and surprise.

Barnes.

“Go!”  Daria gave Rogers a shove towards the fence. “Get those to Dernier!”

“What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine, just _go!”_

He gritted his teeth and made a dash for the fence, scrambling up and over just as men began to shout from the main body of the encampment.

She turned _away_ from the fence, and moved at a limping run towards the sounds of shouting. It wasn’t long before she was spotted, and her appearance caused a moment of confusion among the four soldiers who saw her, for she still wore the German army jacket she’d taken from the man in the patrol they’d saved Morita from.

The grenade she flung at them quickly cleared up any confusion they had. She covered her eyes and ears just as it exploded, tearing a great crater in the ground at their feet and spraying everything in the area with bits of gravel and worse. She didn’t stop. Blinking spots from her eyes, she kept moving, keeping low and ducking between buildings as men rushed towards the explosion to investigate. She still needed to make sure they could not pursue their tank and truck, if they were going to get all their wounded soldiers home.

With everyone running towards the source of the big boom and the noise, it was easy for one lone figure wearing a familiar uniform to slip between patches of shadow and make their way around the camp.  There were six tanks lined up here, not the five Morita had counted. Daria cursed softly. She’d only taken six grenades, and she’d already used one. Even if she crippled one tank for every grenade she had left, that still left one to pursue them.

No time to worry about that now. She only had a narrow window in which to carry out her sabotage. One tank, Falsworth could probably deal with.

Glancing quickly about for anyone who might spot her, she took a deep breath and sprinted across the open space between her hiding place and the first tank, snatching one of the grenades from her pocket. She didn’t pull the pin, just unhooked the safety from it before casting it underhand beneath the body of the tank. It fetched up in amongst the treads, precisely where she wanted it.

She moved down the line, rolling each grenade into some vulnerable nook or cranny. Ducking behind the last one, she focused her mind on the pin of each one and gave it a quick little mental yank, grateful that while her telekinetic gift was not at all strong, she didn’t need line-of-sight to affect something as long as she knew it well enough.

Five years into this war, she knew hand grenades quite well enough.

They went off, one-two-three and _fourfive_ , in a great series of explosions that she felt, the rapid concussions slamming through her chest in succession. The lone intact tank took the brunt of the blasts, sparing her.

More shouts went up. Deciding she’d had enough fun for the evening, Daria flung herself into the shape of the eagle owl and launched into the air with powerful beats of her wings.

A few more explosions practically on top of the camp’s fence quickly proved that this was a bad decision. The flares of light and blasts of sound stunned her, and she tumbled out of the air in a daze. The barrage of light and sound would have been enough to disorient and daze a normal human; to an owl, it was a hundred times worse.

 It felt like she laid there for hours, though objectively she knew it could only have been a few seconds.  As soldiers rushed to investigate, she slowly pushed  herself to her feet and hopped- owls were not what one would call graceful on the ground- to the nearest shelter, right underneath the sole remaining tank.

“ _Shau dort!_ ” someone shouted. Guns barked, spraying the outside of the tank’s treads with bullets. “ _Jemand is unter dem Tank!_ ”

_Oh you sons of-_

She needed to be smaller, sneakier, something better able to hide.  A cat. She could be a cat. She could focus enough to be a cat-

A bullet dug a furrow in the ground six inches from her beak. She screeched in alarm as she hopped awkwardly back, dirt spraying over her splayed wings. A half-second later, and she was a cat, tumbling backwards over her own tail. She gave in to the cat’s instincts- namely, run- and bolted, her tail fluffed to three times its normal size and yowling as if all the dogs in the world were chasing her as she dashed out from under the tank and across the open space.

Another bullet struck nearby, then she heard more shouting in German. A superior officer was berating his underling for shooting at nothing more than a feral cat. She didn’t stick around to listen to any more, she just fled for better cover than the tank could offer.

The nearest shelter was under a set of steps leading to a long, low building. She curled up there, shivering in reaction to the surge of fear. Her fur still stood on end, and anyone who thought to peer under the steps would have gotten a face full of claws before he could so much as blink.

< _Rogers! >_ She made the mindcall as ‘loud’ as she dared, focusing only on his mind. < _Rogers! Take Barnes and Jones and Dernier and go with the tank! I’ll come as soon as I’m able- I’m safe, I can catch up, but don’t wait for me. Get those men across the border and behind our lines! >_

For a moment, she thought she sensed a reply, a wordless, somehow reluctant assent. She shook her head. No, she was surely imagining things. She was tired and had just had to run for her life after practically taking a flash-bang to the face.  She surely hadn’t heard anything.

Shivering all over, she turned and licked her fur until it lay flat and smooth again and she no longer felt the need to fluff it up. Her ears twitched almost constantly, listening to the sounds of the base around her. The Germans were still looking for whoever had set off the grenades and damaged their tanks, shouting to one another to find the culprits. As scattered as they were, they were not able to mount any kind of real pursuit when her peoples’ tank and truck came roaring down the nearby road. A few soldiers went after them on foot, but no more than that.

It was a while  before she could bring herself to uncurl from her hiding place and take to the air once more as an owl. No one paid her any notice as she flew off into the woods to catch up with the rest of her people. By the time she finally did, the freed prisoners had pushed quite a ways into Allied territory, and they were looking a lot more relieved.

Rogers kept looking about as he walked with Barnes next to the tank, squinting a little to peer into the darkness. She made one quick pass along the line before gliding back and landing, in her own shape, beside the two Americans.

“Noclaf!” Rogers cried. “Thank God- are you okay?”

She nodded as Barnes leaned past Rogers to look at her. “I’m fine. I just added to Dernier’s distraction, then hid until things quieted down. What about you lot?”

“We’re okay,” Rogers said. “They took a few potshots at us while we were moving past but they were a bit preoccupied.”

“Something about their tanks blowing up or something, I guess,” Barnes added. “I guess they found that distracting for some reason.”

“I wonder why.” She smiled wryly. “Thanks for the save in there, Barnes. That was a damn good shot.” She offered her hand, and after a moment he clasped it, nodding.

“It’s what I do.”

Rogers put an arm around both their shoulders. “Come on, you two,” he said. “They’ve saved a spot by the fire for us.”

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the delay on this, it's been an awfully busy few months.


End file.
